It's virtually becoming a writerly rite of passage in Mexico City: Finding and dining at the mythical "good Chinese place" in the vicinity of metro Viaducto. Author David Lida first discovered Ka Won Seng, thanks to a tip from a cabbie. "It took years," Lida writes, "but I finally found an excellent Chinese restaurant in Mexico City."
Food writer Nicholas Gilman then took on the case for Inside Mexico, citing Lida's tip. Afterwards, The Mexile went down to verify the news for himself. Yes, beautiful shrimp, tofu and duck dishes could be had there, without a single "café chino" menu item in sight. No chopsticks either, just the home-style spoon-and-fork.
The other night we made it to Ka Won Seng with a crew working in the journalismisms, for a friend's birthday. Plate after plate came our way, each perfectly executed, leaving the table's spinning center pushed and yanked the entire night. I got especially down with a soup of beef and algae. Washed it all down with a few Tsingtao.
It reminded me of the good Chinese I've had in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Now, there might be another place somewhere in the endless concrete jungle of D.F. that matches Ka Won Seng's caliber. Until someone finds it, this is we're we'll go to satisfy the craving.
Mexico City artist Yoshua Okon opens a new solo show, Ventanilla única, at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil on Tuesday night. The show emphasizes recent video and photography previously not seen in Mexico, including his 2008 project White Russians, which focuses on a "family" living in the remote and desolate California high desert.
One of the most accomplished Mexican artists from the 90s generation, Yoshua's work consistently gets under your skin. On the surface it is humorous, bizarre or even abusive. But underneath it exposes uncomfortable barriers of class and culture, and in the lopsided relationship between subjects and documenters (where far too many artists, journalists, academics, and filmmakers lack a critical stance or approach).
"The excuse of the camera, the excuse of it 'being art,' offers you opportunities that everyday life does not allow you," the artist explains in this VBS documentary. In effect, Yoshua's practice is about exploiting exploitation, while directly implicating the viewer in the process. My favorite of his pieces, which I can return to over and over, are Lago Bolsena, Crabby, Presenta, Orillese a la Orilla, Rinoplastia, and Cockfight.
Okon and fellow artist Miguel Calderon were the original proprietors of La Panadería, the experimental arts space in the once tucked-away and forgotten Col. Condesa whose success eventually helped spawn ... the new Condesa. Among artists who belong to that period of Mexico City's avant-garde and have been covered previously in Intersections are Mariana Botey, Dr. Lakra, Ruben Ortiz-Torres, Teresa Margolles, Miguel Calderon and Eduardo Abaroa.
Ventanilla única is at the Carrillo Gil until early January 2010.
* Image above: White Russians, 2008. Performance. High Desert Test Sites. Joshua Tree, E.U. 8-9 Nov, 2008. 12-5pm.
I've zapped out this video on other platforms before, but not yet on this one. Here is "Mykonos" by Fleet Foxes, the loveliest song I've heard all year in this rising genre.
Gorilla vs. Bear has the video of Fleet Foxes playing "Blue Ridge Mountains" in the abandoned Grand Palais in Paris. The "Mykonos" video is directed by Sean Pecknold.
We used this photo as the flier for a recent party in our building. Most people thought I grabbed it from somewhere. But no. We were looking for a theme, and I had a pile of 'Hello My Name Is' stickers handy. Tagged it, and presto -- one photo taken among many during one of those long 'If-it-happens-it-happens' sort of nights.
In the big, bad D.F. you never know what the urbe and the cosmos might throw at you, or what alter egos you might encounter along the way. It's a good theme for right now. And for the possibilities ahead.
Above, Swedish artist and musician Sara Lunden performing before a scrim installation by José León Cerrillo, at Proyectos Monclova, late Friday night, September 18. Standing behind the performer behind a curtain did not provide the clearest view of the show, but it was a nice place from which to listen to Lunden's music and voice, a haunting and unpolished lo-fi art-rock, somewhat in the spirit of fellow Swedes The Knife.
More views of the performance and León's show here, here, and here. (Here is video I shot on my digital camera, with corresponding audio quality.) Proyectos Monclova, which opened in 2005, sits on a forgotten little plaza between the roaring Revolución and Patriotismo arteries, in Mixcoac.
If you tried making it to the last presentations of this mysterious "light show" at the Zócalo on Saturday night, bless you. We passed through the plaza at around 5 p.m., coming down from Tepito, and it already felt congested and tense.
"What's going on? Get us out of here."
By 10 p.m., when the last show was supposed to have happened, the Zócalo and surrounding streets were packed "beyond capacity." Reporters on the scene said there were minimal police and emergency crews on hand, producing chaos between people who were desperate to get inside the plaza for a view of the show and those desperate to get out. "I don't want to die like at News Divine!" people reportedly screamed. Just too many people, too many stalled vehicles, not enough order in Centro, which makes you wonder where the authorities were spending their evening. Milenio says spectators organized themselves to create exit passages.
At around 11 p.m., we went for a stroll to see how close we could get to the plancha. Rivers of humans walked past us in the opposite direction. At the Zócalo, tens of thousands, at least, were still milling about.
Two thoughts on this. First, the people of Mexico City clearly need more free family activities at their disposal, even with the mayor's winter ice rink and springtime "beaches." Second, incredibly, no one in the crowds seemed stressed or fatigued as they left the city's core.
If you can muster watching it, here is security camera footage of the Friday afternoon shooting on metro Balderas, on the north-bound platform of Line 3. At 5:14 p.m., a Metro police officer approaches a man who is scrawling graffiti on a wall. The man pulls out a gun and shoots the officer, killing him. The rush-hour crowd scatters instantly. In the confusion, a second man attempts to subdue the shooter, but he stumbles several times, and the assailant eventually fires into his head, ending his life.
Luis Felipe Hernández (who invoked God before starting to shoot at people) moves into the stalled train, still pointing his .38-caliber revolver at others. Commuters are seen being evacuated out of the station, in single-file against the walls. Minutes later, a plain-clothes police officer approaches the train, his weapon drawn. Shots are fired. Hernández is tackled.
Esteban Cervantes Barrera, the unarmed man who tried to stop Hernandez, had 5 children, Televisa said. He's being hailed as a hero, and the government says it will adopt his survivors. The officer killed has been identified as Víctor Miranda Martínez. He is being honored today at the Monumento de la Revolución. Now metal detectors will be used inside the system and 1,600 new officers are being added to the platforms. They will be armed.
There is a culture of violence in Mexico, definitely, but a crazy person randomly shooting people is not the sort of thing that happens here. To put it bluntly, that's an American thing. But something is shifting. A God-invoking Bolivian hijacked an Aeromexico flight last Wednesday between Cancun and Mexico City.
It's as though the collective madness of right now has been turned up a few notches. In the U.S., the extreme narco violence in Mexico is often (and unfairly) characterized as a creeping contagion "spilling" into the North. There's a flip-side to that. The U.S.-style violence of insanity, chaos, and senselessness is also being exported South. Along with everything else.
Yesterday when I first heard the news -- in a frantic call from a friend -- I was in a meeting near metro Patriotismo. I rushed out to try to make it to the scene. The metro was operating as normal. Then my train stalled in the tunnel just before the transfer point Centro Medico -- for a half-hour. Crowded shoulder to shoulder, in the hot tunnel, moisture on our skin from the rain, we stood ... and stood ... patient. When our train was finally cleared to the platform, a wall of people attempted to push into our car, while a few of us inside tried pushing out.
I'm not above trendy American-style outbursts, so I hollered, "Dejen salir!" and fought my way through, somehow losing a set of earphones in the crush. People were crammed on the platform, wall to lip; every transfer point with Line 3 had to have been screwed. I struggled to make it to the surface, deciding to just walk -- yet hundreds, maybe thousands of people were coming down into the station nonetheless.
They had to get home.
The craziness of U.S. violence may be arriving in Mexico, but the crazy American-style reactions to it don't appear to be.
We use the metro in Mexico City because it costs 2 pesos, moves quickly, gets you where you need to be, and is safe. If the city's 4.5-million daily metro riders can handle a typical Friday rush-hour commute, no armed lunatic thrown occasionally into the mix will stand in our way between Point A and Point B.
Los Angeles "Mexican regional" artist Jenni Rivera has just one message for her new socia, her boyfriend's fiancee, just ... one message ... Jenni of course doesn't mess around. So no need to mention, please, that minor US$50,000 in cash at the Mexico City international airport incident in May.
The National History Museum at the Castillo de Chapultepec is about as overwhelming as the anthropology museum down the hill: it lays out five centuries of modern Mexican history in intimidating detail through artifacts, decorative objects, portraits, maps, murals, and more. In other words, there's a lot to look at.
Feeling nominally patriotic, we checked it out on Tuesday, a day before Independence Day. We skipped a few centuries in the exhibit halls, fatigued after spending so much time peering into the Hapsburgs residential quarters. But in a temporary exhibit I spotted the piece shown above, a bronze medallion of national hero Miguel Hidalgo designed by Tiffany in New York, and presented as a gift to Francisco Madero in 1910. Very nice.
Here's an interesting post at Style Amor on a striking yellow unitard Lady Gaga wears in the video for her song "Paparazzi." It's from a recent Jeremy Scott collection, but the image in the print resembles the Mickey Mouse ears-wearing Quetzal, of Mexico City designing duo Marvin y Quetzal. Style Amor suggests that Jeremy Scott bit off a Marvin y Quetzal design, but several people I've consulted disagree, saying that Jeremy Scott first used Mickey Mouse ears prints in 2006. For his part, Marvin Duran tells me people often think the piece in the video is theirs, not by Scott. (I tried unsuccessfully to get in touch with Jeremy about this topic through various friends.)
We'd all like to see more recognition for the independent fashion being generated in Mexico currently. Often, it seems, designers in the U.S. or Europe are, uh, inspired by their counterparts in Mexico, as happened recently with EGR, and not completely forthcoming about their sources. In the "Paparazzi" unitard case, the origin of the print really doesn't matter. It's Lady Gaga's world now. Here, pop is central to fashion, fashion is central to pop, and who did what first becomes untraceable and irrelevant. Yet seeing an echo of dear Quetzal upon Lady Gaga -- the pop-fashion queen of the moment -- in a video about pop overload and death is significant in its own way.
Saturday, September 12 marked the one-year anniversary of the death of Quetzalcoatl Rangel Sanchez, one of Mexican fashion's brightest young stars. It's not something his friends get together and talk about much, even when we run into each other -- which happens mostly at loud, crowded parties -- but you can still feel this terrible absence in Mexico City without him. There's still this shock, a sustained disbelief, that he is no longer with us.
This week my thoughts have been with Quetzal's family (whom I had the privilege of meeting in April 2008), with Marvin, and with his closest and most trusted friends. May Quetzal's spirit live on, on Lady Gaga or not, but more importantly in our hearts and dreams -- where I am told he is still regularly making appearances.
Here's 26 seconds of video from the corner of 5 de Febrero and Venustiano Carranza, in downtown Mexico City, on the crisp and wet afternoon of September 10, 2009. Stands like this dot the city in September, selling patriotic knick-knacks leading up to Tuesday night, Sept. 15, when Mexicans around the world gather to (drunkenly) holler El Grito of independence.
Last year, in Morelia in President Felipe Calderón's home state, a grenade exploded during the fiestas patrias, killing eight and injuring dozens. That attack was labeled 'narcoterror' and blamed on a cartel. Completely unrelated, I hope, two small bombs have been detonated in the D.F. in front of chain businesses in the middle of the night this month. At one of them, a note was left calling for the liberation of Mexico's political prisoners.
Both those bombings, by the way, were on Tuesdays, Sept. 1, and Sept. 8.
Coming up, Dr. Lakra, a member of that now-mythical 1990s Panaderia generation of young Mexican artists, opens his first solo show at the new Kurimanzutto space in Col. San Miguel Chapultepec. The gallery announcement says the artist is preparing a mural-drawing covering 230 squared meters of wall space that will feature images of "African female figures, Hindu deities, Japanese prints, 19th Century scientific, medical, and anthropological illustrations, even porno [...]"
Lakra, whose father is Francisco Toledo, is also a noteworthy tattoo artist.
Above, converging in the middle of Mexico City with a French-Iranian curator and art worker from New York, and a Zacatecas pocho artist and "wanderer" from San Francisco, swapping secrets on crocheting and crystals, mythologies both ancient and contemporary, and on how similar Mexico City is to Tehran -- as anyone who's been to both places always concurs.
More here, here, here, and here. You get the sense this sort of thing happens all the time, in 2009 in the bellybutton of the moon, guided by ideal convergences. The idea struck me as I walked the other night in the rain on a strip of Calzada de Tlalpan dotted with thumping cantinas, transgendered sex workers, and the local Chinese.
Collazo Projects post on a performance in New York City by Concha Buika, a Spanish singer born in 1972 in Mallorca to parents from Ecuatorial Guinea. "Her Spanish accent provokes curiosity," Francisco Collazo writes. "Her voice is a siren song. We
travel musically from Africa to the Americas and back to Europe."
Here's a video that shows a Mexican Muslim named Mustafa demonstrating an example of dawa in Mexico -- an advertisement for Islam.com.mx on the metro. More videos of people preaching Islam in Mexico are here and here, in a taxi cab.
The bicultural, bilingual, binational Mexico City-born artist Ruben Ortiz-Torres opened a dual show with Marcos Lopez at the Centro del Imagen last week. Ortiz-Torres, who teaches art at UC San Diego, presents his series of photographs of pyramids in otherwordly, dislocated contexts: a pyramid-shaped water-slide at a resort in the Bahamas, a pyramid-shaped furniture store in San Diego, a gym at Cal State Long Beach, as seen above.
I posted not too long ago about glittery and unsettling Santa Fe, "Mexico's Dubai." Well, on the outskirts, the "original Santa Fe" persists, the people and culture that was born around what was once a massive trash dump.
On Sunday I journeyed deep into these areas identified as slums with a native resident, an original Mexico City punk. As such, he is also a displaced subject, as many of these neighborhoods were razed to make way for the city's new business district. From my current batch of work:
For four years the families of Santa Fe battled the government, "at war," as the survivors still say, over their land. For much of that time, they lived sit-in-style in front of government buildings, and otherwise wandered the urban geography as refugees, utterly homeless.
It is a forgotten history, of a forgotten people, my friend explained.
* More later. Meantime, check out this punk chronicle at NAM.
President Felipe Calderón lost his first battle with the new PRI-controlled Congress last week -- and the legislative body hadn't even convened yet. Yes. It's going to be a looooooong legislative session.
The Cámara de Diputados officially got to work this week, so on Tuesday downtown traffic was jammed with the corresponding "new Congress" protests, before the chamber at San Lázaro, before the municipal government palace, the National Palace, and at the intersection of Madero and Eje Central. There, the perpetually protesting 400 Pueblos finally put their clothes back on. But, apparently seeking a new gimmick, each dancing demonstrator is now wearing a Barack Obama mask.
Today, the president delivers his government's informe before allies and invited guests at the Palacio -- heavily, heavily guarded by EMPs and soldiers, of course.
Government buildings in the Centro and those surrounding the Zócalo are already being draped for the upcoming (and always tense) Independence Day celebrations, which means garish, over-the-top (and costly?) patriotic decorations bearing down on you from just about everywhere. As prospects for the future get grimmer and weirder, the partying, I guess, will just get harder and harder.
Recent Comments