Intersections

Mexico in the black hole of universality

* Terminal countdown: the Templo Mayor bicentennial clock.

Why is Mexico rarely invited to the world dialogue? Why are its challenges and triumphs rarely considered "universal"? Why is Mexico never grouped as "Western," or as belonging to "the West"? (Nevermind that William S. Burroughs tossed out in his novel "Queer" the idea that Mexico is "basically an Oriental culture.")

Claudio Lomnitz argues that this historical curiosity comes partly from a domestic source. Mexican intellectuals "fetishize" their national problems, or Great National Problems, Lomnitz says, and thus remain passive participants in the evolution of world history, unable to see connectivity to issues beyond their own borders.

This creates a bunch of black holes. Sort of like how in children's books on the great civilizations of antiquity, Persia, China, Greece, Rome are all there, as our rational ancestors, but Mexico is usually absent. Now apply that same basic abstract to globalization, or even the War on Drugs. Then take it anywhere you want. The yawning absence of immigrants -- those who abandoned the nation -- in Mexico's political and cultural life, for instance.

From Lomnitz's introduction to "Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico":

In Mexico, narratives that identify the habits of the Mexican people as paradigms of rationality, and therefore as universally applicable, have had little success. The country has been hyperconscious of its backward condition for at least 150 years. Moreover, it has had to deal with a layered history of imperialist depictions: in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mexicans could not be made into the paragon of rationality because they were racially inferior; later on, the Mexican people were portrayed as traditionalists, as fatalists whose rational capabilities, though no longer biologically deniable, were no less blinded by superstition. Today Mexico is routinely labeled a "developing nation." Because it is allegedly not yet developed, it is not in a position to speak for humanity at large. Not surprisingly, then, Mexican faculties have concentrated on contributions to the resolution of the nation's problems. These need to be dealt with first; universality will come later.

Mexican-born Lomnitz is a professor of history and anthropology at Columbia University. He is the gifted author of "Death and the Idea of Mexico," a book that is a providing a strong theoretical basis for portions of my own upcoming book.

How is that going? My editor has returned my foreword and first four chapters, with line edits. The hardest part is yet to come. But, taking a plunge, I am willing to now disclose my working title.

The book is called "The Lake of Fire." ... And, line edits terrify me.

BLOG NOTE: Intersections now goes dark for 15 days. You can still follow my link-sharing and observations on Twitter and Facebook. I also edit the Mexico page for The Faster Times. TFT is an interesting new experiment in online journalism at a time when the only unifying characteristics of our practice are experimentation and that great black void of an uncertain future.

Celebrating at El Angel

Per their tradition, fans poured over to the Angel of Independence on Sunday to celebrate Mexico's 5-0 Gold Cup win over the United States, which considerably raises the stakes in the rivalry before Aug. 12's World Cup qualifying match at Estadio Azteca.

The scene was heavily policed and rowdy. People spontaneously decided to do a long victory lap around the monument, some bikers came through to burn fuel and tires, and then weirdly, an especially energetic contingent of Ámerica fans showed up -- even though Ámerica lost in a match with Chelsea that day.

Here's a clip I shot in the crowd just before a downpour of party foam. Mexico, by the way, hadn't beaten their rivals on U.S. soil in 10 yeas, since March 1999 in San Diego. A popular chant at the Angel: "El que no baila es gringo! El que no baila es gringo!" (Roughly, "If you don't dance you're a gringo!")

Santa Fe is Mexico's Dubai

* Above, driving in the rain in Santa Fe.

By far the most unsettling but not totally unexpected creation in contemporary Mexico City is Santa Fe, a hyper-modern district on the city's far west that epitomizes all that is wrong with the rapid commercialization and privatization of global urban development in the past 10 or 20 years. And -- it was built over a landfill and is surrounded by slums.

There's a new Habita group hotel in the area, Distrito Capital, but it's not clear to me who'd choose to stay there. As Mexcellent says, "This is perhaps the closest thing in Mexico City to Dubai."

On assignment, we ventured the other day to Centro Santa Fe. The three-level mall is enormous and packed on weekends. International chains compete with small Mexican shops, and the food court has a Burger King and a franchise selling tortas from Tamaulipas. Also, kiosks to charge your cell phone for free and interactive mall maps that talk.

The highlight, though, is the mall's fairly new Saks Fifth Avenue, one of only five Saks stores located outside the United States -- the other four are all on the Arabian Peninsula. We can thank Carlos Slim for the distinction; he bought the license to build a Saks on Aztec earth.

And just so you know, Sante Fe's official "neighborhood" site has a page devoted to the topic of security.

Trails of blood in the Mormon killing case?

* Above, the funeral in Colonia LeBarón, via Zocalo de Saltillo.

In Mexico, citizens who organize to fight their communities' culture of fear and corruption become targets themselves. In Mexico, criminals express their power through killing. Religious minority communities are not exempt in such a system. From Elisabeth Malkin in Chihuahua:

When a 16-year-old boy was kidnapped from this fundamentalist Mormon community in early May, ransom was set at $1 million. The town chose not to pay. Instead, led by the boy's older brother, members of the community traveled to the state capital, Chihuahua, to demand that the government catch the kidnappers. Nobody knows exactly why, but seven days later, the boy was freed.

Soon, from other towns scattered in the valleys that stretch under the purple-rimmed mountains of the Sierra Madre, farmers facing extortion and intimidation began pleading with the crusading brother, Benjamín LeBarón — a great-grandson of the Mormon community's founder — for help. He tried, forming a group to help towns put pressure on the authorities. And then he was dead.

As things stand now, the Benjamín LeBarón case cannot remain an isolated incident for very long. But, there's always a back story. Richard Grabman at The Mex Files excavates the curious and blood-ridden history of the LeBarón clan:

When Alma died in 1951, leadership in the community passed to his son, Joel. Joel left the Apostolic United Brethern to found his own church, the "Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times." At least some of the LeBarons, including second in command, Joel's younger brother Ervil, later moved to Baja California. Ervil moved to San Diego, California to start a second church.

And, then it gets very, very weird.

More there.

The politics of a binational soccer rivalry

* Above, coach 'El Vasco,' via SPD.

Mexico and the United States face off on the futbol field on Sunday, in New York, and the tensions of a long-suffering and maybe somewhat lopsided rivalry are pitched high. From a recent post I wrote at The Faster Times:

And why should you care, noble follower of baseball, basketball or U.S. football? Because soccer is the world’s sport, and because anytime the United States and Mexico — the “So far from God, so close to the United States” Mexico — confront one another on a field of play, it’s always about much, much more than the final score.

Put another way, these two squads despise each other, and as the U.S. keeps building a powerhouse reputation and Mexico keeps struggling, the stakes are only getting higher and higher.

On Friday a scandalized El Universal carried a story highlighting a jab at Mexican national coach Javier Aguirre that a U.S. player posted on Twitter. "Apparently we're sharing a plane with the Mexican national team," Jimmy Conrad wrote. "I hope the Mexican coach doesn't kick me when I walk past him in the aisle."

Conrad's account is now down, but you might say Aguirre deserved it. Frustrated with his team's performance in a Gold Cup match against Panama earlier this month, Aguirre kicked an opposing player who got near him in the middle of play. The coach was subsequently suspended for three games, and Mexico was fined $25,000.

We'll see how, uh, animated things get between U.S. and Mexico tomorrow, when Aguirre returns to the field.

Everyone in the fountain!

It was hot in Guadalajara this past week. Warm and sticky. Walking the long pedestrian plazas before the Orozco-adorned Hospicio Cabañas on Sunday afternoon, we found that the fountain pools were being used by tapatios for bathing purposes.

Crowds of people, mostly kids, happily took a dip in the fountains, without a single police officer or municipal authority in sight. Hygiene be damned. It felt like an oasis, a paradise of urban anarchy.

Mexican divers: Going for gold, and alcoholism?

* Espinosa, via Getty Images.

Mexican diver Paola Espinosa stunned the reigning Olympic gold medalist Chen Ruolin in the 10-meter platform event at the World Championships in Rome last week. Beating the powerhouse Chinese in diving is no small feat. "I have worked hard all my life," she told reporters later. "Now my next goal is to confirm this gold medal at the Olympic Games in London 2012."

After track star Ana Guevara didn't deliver the gold at Athens and Sydney, then turned to politics, Espinosa will be Mexico's athlete to root for at the London Games. A 22-year-old native of Baja California, Espinosa won the bronze in synchronized diving with partner Tatiana Ortiz in Beijing last year.

Meanwhile, fellow diver Yahel Castillo (who was named among the "sexiest athletes" at the Games in Beijing) is still a contender for Olympic glory but is also turning into a bit of a disappointment. Mexican diving officials sanctioned Castillo for allegedly arriving drunk at an event at the World University Games in Belgrade earlier this month. He apologized in an interview with Televisa Sports, and asked for forgiveness: "The atmosphere at a University meet is not the same as a World meet or the Olympic Games."

The 22-year-old diver was allowed to compete in Rome after all. Today, Yahel advanced to the finals in the 3-meter diving board event.

Morality and reason in Mexico's drug war

* Above, moral authorities: Felipe and Margarita, via La Jornada.

There is a tendency to see the bloody and surreal narco war in Mexico in stark black-and-whites, but just a scratching of the surface reveals infinite shades of gray, and degrees of complicity up and down the class scale. Are small-time users on both sides of the border good guys or bad guys? How about a cartel that has strict Christianist values but makes no hesistation in killing those who cross them? And what about all those narco-politicians who allegedly strike deals with traffickers in order to minimize violence and disorder in their states?

Consider also the dark labyrinth of moral corruption that permeates local media operations across the country. From Charles Bowden's engrossing narrative on the life of a journalist in the narco-controlled North:

"Corruption at the paper," he explains, "was subtle. The politicians would win over my boss with dinners and bags of money. The reporter on the beat would sometimes get pressure from the boss not to report certain things like the bad habits of politicians, the houses they own, the girlfriends. And it was understood that you never asked hard questions. The narcos also gave out money but I was always afraid of them. They own businesses and horses, buy ads, have parties with celebrities and you cover that, they would pay you to cover that, but you never mentioned their real business."

He sees his Mexico as genetically corrupt. A corrupt Aztec ruling class fused with the trash of Spain, the conquistadors. This thesis helps him face the reality around him.

"In Mexico," he says, "we operate in disguise. There is one face and under that is another mask. Nothing is up-front."

Read the whole thing here; it's worth it. The piece also dissects corruption and impunity in the oh-so-upright Mexican military.

Far as I'm concerned, one of the most disingenuous gestures I've seen so far in this eternal mess is the head of the Mexican state saying publicly that Mexican youth become "slaves" of the narco trade because, yes, "they don't believe in God, they don't know him."

Unreasoned, outrageous, and as a statement from an executive in a secular republic, deeply immoral.

City of romance

Here is the door to an apartment in a shared house in Guadalajara, where we are staying till ... not sure when. The outlying streets of the Centro feel untouched and imbued with a romance found only in the best kind of modern Latin American novels.

At night, bands of revelers parade through the pedestrian streets, without any fears or cares ... till 3, 4, 5 in the morning. It's a freedom that used to define nightlife in Mexico City, before the smoking ban, before the 2:30 closing time. Honestly, being stranded in the GDL makes for a happy feeling.

* Tuesday night, we're checking out Chou Room, a week-long trade show of street art, fashion, and music.

Stranded in Guadalajara *

Please be advised that I am alive and well in the tierra caliente of Guadalajara, happy, on assignment, exploring its Centro, getting lost, and utterly utterly poor. This city is beautiful and offers many gifts to the earnest explorer.

* Post updated. More soon.

Eduardo Abaroa on altering the city

Here's the Pase Usted video of artist Eduardo Abaroa discussing some of his most celebrated installations, at the most recent salon at the top of the Latino, The City. I didn't know that the portable toilets in his Stonehenge recreation were fully functional.

Free thoughts on 'Free'

* New York Times illustration by David Reinfurt.

I probably won't go out and buy the book "Free" by Chris Anderson, but I'll read free reviews of it, and gather pertinent -- and free -- excerpts for my future reference. I wonder if the author would be pleased to hear this.

From Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

"Information wants to be free," Anderson tells us, "in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill." But information can't actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?

Good question. It sounds like a fascinating study of markets and media. The Wall Street Journal review of the book is here, and the New York Times review is here. Free to read, of course.

* Wait, the whole book is here! Brilliant.

Excavations: The Original Notations

From a YouTube playlist called OK CHOLO. It's "I'm Still Here" by The Notations, one of the many bands grouped up with the Eastside oldies sound popular among our parents in the 50s and 60s. (And still popular I bet among nostalgic pachucos everywhere.)

The Notations are actually from Chicago, and are still playing.

RIP Dash Snow *

* Via BLOGUE.

He was "a photographer, sculptor, graffiti and installation artist" who "captured the raw and decadent nature of the NYC underworld and art culture." More importantly, to those who got to spend time with him, Dash Snow was within his true self a genuine, warm, and kind person.

Filled equally with electricity, generosity, and mischief, he just did what he did, and did it well. My thoughts today are with Secret, Jade, all his collaborators, all his friends, his crew, and his family.

* In Interview: "I just want to hang out with my baby and make art."

Rest peacefully, Dash.

Iztapalapa: Political chessboard of Mexico's left

  * Seen from the press pit, Juanito, AMLO, and far right, Clara.

It sounded like another curious footnote to the otherwise unexceptional July 5 elections. In the Iztapalapa borough of Mexico City, the race for delegation chief was won by a cartoonish character known as "Juanito," from the tiny Partido de Trabajo, or Worker's Party. The PT often makes alliance tickets with the leftist PRD. But how did the little party beat all the big-shots outright?

It didn't. The "Juanito" win was all the plan of Andres Manuel López Obrador, the self-proclaimed "legitimate president" of Mexico. Here's the back-story: "Juanito," real name Rafael Acosta, struck a deal with allies in the opposition wing of the PRD, led by López Obrador, in which he would resign the office the day he assumes it, so that Mayor Marcelo Ebrard (also an AMLO man) would be required to appoint a replacement. That replacement is to be Clara Brugada, the AMLO-supported PRD candidate who was not allowed to run for Iztapalapa chief. The PRD wing currently in power, known as "Los Chuchos" for party president Jesús Ortega, muscled their own person on the ballot there.

Make sense so far?

Determined not to lose influence in Iztapalapa, AMLO's wing of the PRD conceived, executed, and delivered a defiant blow to the central leadership. The "Chuchos" candidate lost on Sunday. "Juanito" won Iztapalapa, but really it is Brugada who is the victor. The two in fact campaigned together, their images transmitted along with that of Andres Manuel, who succeeded in reminding the country just how strong his base of support really is. Iztapalapa is the most populated delegación in the capital, with 1.8 million people. It it were its own city it would be the fifth largest in the country.

Now, if this whole things sounds a little weird, that's because it is.

A rumbling movement

How many of these have you come across around Mexico in the last week? They are the billboards of a budding democracy -- basic, utilitarian, up-front. At each polling place on the night of elections in Mexico, tally results are marked and made public for all to review on paper sheets. They stay up for days.

This is a casilla sheet I ran into in a nice area of Coyoacan. As you can see, the right-leaning PAN won the polling place with 144 votes. Second came the resurgent PRI. Third came the left-leaning PRD, and right behind in fourth came ... voto nulo.

I've stumbled upon six casilla sheets in the past week, and heard anecdotally of several others; they've all told the same story. The top parties took the bulk of votes, but right behind, competitively, astoundingly, the grassroots protest vote made a remarkably strong showing. In Mexico City, it captured 11% of the vote, the highest of any federal entity. And that figure isn't just a sophisticated urbanite anomoly. Voto nulo is now the de facto third or fourth largest "political force" in some states, and became the fifth largest vote-getter overall. Keep in mind, it did so without hundreds of millions of pesos in public campaign financing enjoyed by even the most marginal parties.

That, objectively, says a lot.

Máximo González: Dead money brought to life *

Born in Argentina and based in Mexico City, Máximo González is a contemporary artist perhaps best known for his inspired use of devalued currencies. I first mentioned his work in this post on the "Poetics of the Handmade" show at MOCA in Los Angeles two years ago.

The above clip documents "Inflation," an installation he did recently at MUAC on the UNAM campus. It consists of 1,000 metallic balloons left to deflate into a field of crumpled, shimmering plastic -- for months. When I caught it, a silvery light had been placed above the space, giving the whole work an alien kind of glow. The balloons are printed with the figure 10c on one side and the insignia of the Mexican republic on the other, representing coins that are hardly used any longer, deflating before our eyes.

Watch Máximo talk about his work with dead money here; it's a highly recommended mini-doc. "The work with the money in particular is that," he says, "Use all the significances, concepts, ideas, the histories of the countries, the symbols, and with humor and irony ... trap them, give it a meaning, and make it more valuable."

Understanding Honduras

* Manuel Zelaya, marching for his referendum, via Reflector.

What's going on in Honduras? Is the situation merely another living chapter in the eternal melodrama that is Latin American politics, as people like Francisco Goldman, Alvaro Mutis, Roberto Bolaño, and Gabriel García Marquez have all so eloquently captured? On the one hand you have a military coup and crackdowns on civil liberties, on the other you have an ousted president who wanted to re-do the Honduran constitution so he could stay in power longer -- and we all know how that can turn out.

Is this struggle any more urgent because it is playing out in Central America, a region that remains deeply traumatized by a history of U.S.-backed interventions? Nefertiti Altan, currently with the School of the Americas Watch in Caracas, writes me:

The school is directly linked to the current coup in Honduras, as the head commander of the Army, Romeo Vasquez, and Air Force commander Luis Javier Prince Suazo were both graduates of the school. They are currently ordering their troops to forcefully recruit young men into the army, attack peaceful protesters, kidnap and detain social movement leaders and to protect pro-coup media corporations.

You can email her for more info. In the New York Times on Tuesday, a newspaper columnist writes about the indifferent attitude to the conflict among most Hondurans:

And Mr. Zelaya, in many ways, is a typical Honduran politician. He began his four-year term in January 2006, and by mid-2008, the idea of a second term was already in the air, even though it is forbidden by the Constitution. Since its independence from Spain in 1821, Honduras has had 16 constitutions, as these documents were vulnerable to leaders' desire to extend their stay in office. The current constitution, which came into effect in 1982 after many years of military rule, was written to forever protect the country against presidents' overstaying their welcome.

The two sides have agreed to at least hold talks, and they're doing so in Costa Rica at this very moment. Here, Will Grant for the BBC delves into the relationship between Zelaya and Hugo Chavez. I've also gone to Roberto Lovato's Of America, BBC Mundo, El Heraldo in Honduras, and from Venezuela, Aporrea and Telesur.

The best analysis on the Honduras story I've seen so far, though, is by Kevin Coleman at GMU's History News Network, via a friend's Facebook feed:

In the magical realism of Honduran politics, the past comes back to repeat itself as farce. On Monday June 29, in a replay of the military raids on the Jesuit radio station El Progreso of the 1960s and 1970s (the Jesuits committed the grave error of walking with the poor rather than serving as mere instruments of the rich), the Jesuits' progressive radio broadcasts were abruptly pulled off the air at four in the morning. On Sunday evening at 6 PM, just an hour after the coup government's curfew began, a military contingent broke into Radio Progreso's headquarters. With fury and guns pointed, they shouted, "We've come to close down this piece of shit!" One broadcaster had locked himself in to keep broadcasting throughout the night. Shortly after, another military convoy stopped outside Radio Progreso. A group of soldiers approached the radio station’s guard and asked him if there were any people still working inside. When the guard said no, the soldier in charge told him, "If we find someone inside, you will regret it."

Read the whole thing. Zelaya sounds like a perfectly erratic anti-hero.

In closing, let's honor the citizen victims. At least one child was killed during the unrest at Sunday's dramatic airport aborted landing move. Lovato has the chilling "Our Neda" photo.

Salsa and young love, by Danny Daniel

A very smart person at Sony Music somehow found out about a teen prodigy salsa singer in Cartagena, Colombia, and decided, Wanna be BIG? You gotta conquer Mexico City! Danny Daniel, baby-faced and talented, has been doing mid-sized appearances in the D.F. since February, to so far very receptive audiences.

But the whole operation is so under the radar; Danny Daniel has no Wiki, for starters, and his Sony deal has barely been reported. That's besides the point for the hysterical fans. Already you can hear his songs blaring among young people in barrios populares across town. Here's the official version of "Perdoname."

* Previously, "Always 'Por Ti'."

Art Deco meets Art Deco at Bellas Artes

* Above, 'La bella Rafaela,' via.

No better time than now to take a breather at a museum. MX-DF has the info on a new show on Tamara de Lempicka, until August at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, itself an art deco gem. The Polish painter lived her later years in Cuernavaca. The Wiki says her ashes were scattered on Popo. Pretty amazing.

The return of the PRI *

* A new boss in town: PRI jefa Beatriz Paredes, via Mexidata.

More than half of Mexico's voters stayed away from the polls on Sunday for the mid-term congressional election. Of those who did show up to mark ballots, around 6 percent nullified them on purpose, an act of protest as part of the voto nulo movement. The rest can say that they participated in an election that began turning Mexico to the dark corners of its past: The PRI, the folks who maintained a bloody and authoritarian single-party government in Mexico for more than 70 years, were declared the victors of the July 5 election.

The ruling PAN conservatives lost five of six open state governor races to the PRI, except in Sonora, where the horrible day-care fire of early June left the local PRI government politically vulnerable. Internal fights on the left -- within the PRD and the PSD, notably -- gave the insurgent PRI even more openings. The party is now positioned to control the agenda in Congress for the second half of Felipe Calderon's term, a remarkable revival considering the PRI was booted from power in 2000 and ran a distant third for the presidency in 2006. So many people thought they were finished.

Now no one -- not Calderon and his conservatives, not the more progressive wings of the opposition -- will be able to get anything done without support from PRI's majority creepy alliance bloc in the Chamber of Deputies. And what will PRI's agenda be for the next three years? Keep rebuilding the party, keep rebranding and rebranding, and gear up to go for the gold in 2012: Taking back the presidency.

The reality is people are fed up with the never-ending narco war and impatient for boosting economic reform. The current administration has been unable to mitigate either. In the face of so much uncertainty, few options are apparently more attractive than a return to the past.

* My headline report for Free Speech Radio News on Sunday's election is here.

Patterns of a narco state

* Above, graphic by the Wall Street Journal.

In Colima, a small state nudged into the southwest corner of Mexico's Pacific coast, a politician "endorsed" by the Zetas is poised to be elected governor on Sunday. The Wall Street Journal reports on the rising influence of Mexico's narco cartels in regional political campaigns and governments, using the candidacy of Mario Anguiano, a PRI man, as its primary example. More:

According to a September 2007 intelligence assessment by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, the governors of the states of Veracruz and Michoacán had agreements with the Gulf Cartel allowing free rein to that large drug-trafficking gang. In return, said the report, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the cartel promised to reduce violence in Veracruz state and, in Michoacán, financed a gubernatorial race and many municipal campaigns across the state.

Read the whole article here.

Not too recently, a bunch of mayors and other officials were swept up in Michoacán. Interesting, then, that the director of the FBI's operations in Mexico just signed a cooperation accord with the government of Tamaulipas. The NarcoGuerra Times aptly notes: "Considering the Zeta/Gulf organization's proven ability to penetrate federal and local law enforcement in Tamaulipas there might be some problems with this down the road."

Voting for no one in Mexico

* Above, 'voto en blanco' propoganda, with a leftist bent.

Mexicans vote in mid-term congressional elections on Sunday and the most remarkable thing about the whole affair is that so many voters are planning to cast their ballots for no one. The "voto en blanco" or "voto nulo" movement calls for the nullifying of a ballot by placing a huge X across the entire sheet, a gesture of protest and dissatisfaction with the political parties and the entire Mexican political system. Grassroots, decentralized, and non-ideological, the movement is picking up steam.

And why not? The economy is faltering. The traumatic, trippy and only vaguely rationalized narco war has no end in sight. None of the parties' platforms offer a fundamentally radical shift from the country's current course, or if they do, there's little reason to believe anything a Mexican politician says or promises.

"Do you think Mexicans have no memory?" this pro-voto nulo clip asks. At this site, the message is: "Absenteeism is apathy, voting blank is participation."

Indeed, as much as 70% of voters are expected to stay away from the polls on Sunday. The ruling PAN is hoping to expand or at least hold on to its bloc, but most analysts and polls suggest the resurgent PRI will be declared the winner overall on Monday. Voto nulo is not expected to crack 10% of votes cast, a small figure but an undeniably bold message in the long run.

Supporters of voto nulo that I've spoken with -- known by some as anulacionistas -- say they're fed up with what they call a charade of a system. They range from disgruntled ex-politicians, to middle-class elites and active left-wingers, undeterred by the criticism that voto nulo would only weaken Mexico's nascent democracy.

"What kind of democracy are we talking about?" said Benjamin Argumento. "The people voted in 1988 for Cárdenas. Cárdenas won the election, and they didn't let him govern. The people voted for López Obrador in 2006. López Obrador won the election, and they didn't let him govern. The candidates we have today are from the media, from the corporations, who will not give any result, any benefit, for the citizens."

* This is the first election in Mexico in which I am able to participate as a voter. I'm still not sure how I will mark my ballot. More on Monday.

Michael Jackson on a wall in an alley

... In the old-school Sherman barrio of San Diego (read that carefully crafted official description), in process. Notice the gooey, dripping apart face make-up.

Having been so moved by the somber but celebratory BET awards the other night, this made me think, A memorial is a memorial, right?

Graffiti removal as subconscious art?

It's hard to tell if this video is super-serious or seriously satirizing itself. It treats the gray, white and beige blotches of "graffiti abatement" rendered by municipal workers across the U.S. as unintentional extensions of abstract expressionism and minimalism, and an "important step in the future of modern art."

Yes, those quilts of anonymous spots of graffiti erasure are often beautiful. But ... really? * The clip info says the original filmmaker is Matt McCormick.