Intersections

The bridges of Ozomatli *

When I moved to Los Angeles in 2002 I knew nearly nothing about the city and knew nearly no one except for a few friends from college. Roaming town alone, between the L.A. Times newsroom and my corporate apartment, I'd go see my homie Valmiki, Guatemalan American and L.A.-raised, and he'd take me to parties, parks, and places to eat. First in Northeast L.A., then in Boyle Heights and East L.A., then in Silver Lake and Echo Park and downtown.

Little by little, L.A. began to map itself for me.

The bridge, in some respects, between both my college experience in the Bay Area and my early experience in L.A. was the band Ozomatli. I saw them play at the Greek Theater on the Berkeley campus, where I first watched their traditional enter-from-the-audience exit-through-the-audience, a genuine gesture of solidarity, un-self-conscious and sincere. Valmiki and I then saw them about a year later at a community event in Boyle Heights, the downtown skyline rising elegantly against the sunset.

Among those folks, among those sounds, I remembering for the first time feeling ... at home.

On Sunday night when Ozomatli played at the FIL in Guadalajara, I felt an enormous wave of nostalgia for my L.A. days. I have to admit it: my heart ached a little. I know that in more cynical L.A. mindsets Ozomatli is seen as a self-repeating, or even a cliche, but one of the nice after-effects of moving to Mexico and living among "regular people" here is that you can get a refreshing new perspective on notions of community and justice.

Ozomatli as a collective of musicians are clearly committed to both.

Fifteen years later, they're still at it. That means something, beyond their ground-breaking and infections mix of musical genres. You could feel it in the sense of unity among the youth and families dancing last night. Ozo, I thought, are a true treasure of Southern California, and of the bridges possible between nations and borders.

* Previously, "Los Angeles: The future, today?" "The sounds of the barrio, from L.A. to India,"

Mexico always in L.A., L.A. siempre en Mexico *

* Photo above, "Madonna in Progress," via East of West L.A.

I travel on Saturday to Guadalajara, where the big International Book Fair opens with a special guest of honor this year, the city of Los Angeles. From the fair's official site:

A natural bridge between Mexican and American culture, Los Angeles is also a city that has been able to acquire a unique identity relating to cultural production, the trademark that distinguishes its delegation, comprised of around 50 authors, 20 academics, 14 artists and theater companies. The program also includes 7 visual arts exhibitions and a film series presenting classic and contemporary films designed to showcase the diverse perspectives on its urban landscape, its culture and people.

True enough, there's going to be so much going on I won't know where to begin.

Both "Phantom Sightings" and "Vexing" are on view at Guadalajara museums. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will be in town, and so will L.A. Weekly food critic Jonathan Gold, and the Zócalo crew. One panel will have Gregory Rodriguez moderating the question of how Mexican Americans see Mexico.

The Jalisco edition of La Jornada breaks down the Encuentro Chicano, an ambitious two-day program that focuses on Mexican American arts and letters, organized by the Centro Universitario de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades at the University of Guadalajara. I am excited to be moderating a panel with Luis Rodriguez, Maria Amparo Escandon, Jose Luis Valenzuela, and Ruben Martinez. Come check it out if you're in town.

Here is a blog that artist Daniel Gonzalez is running right now from the festivities. So far Daniel has posted on the Hospicio Cabañas, Mixtecas drawing on Converse sneakers, installing the "Vexing" show, and more.

Finally, here is an essay I published on Sunday in the culture section of El Páis, Spain's biggest newspaper. In it, I discuss the radical recent changes to the "vaguely Mexican atmosphere" of Los Angeles, and where us 'post-Chicanos' stand today. I'll have an English translation link to the piece later today.

* Intersections returns on December 3.

Dangers of the single story

Above, a moving talk by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie at TED on the dangers of the "single story." Adichie helps illustrate her point by describing a visit to Guadalajara from the U.S. and being surprised -- and then shamed -- to see people "going to work, smoking, laughing." She had succumbed to the American "single story" on Mexico.

"I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant," Adichie says. "I had bought into the single story of Mexicans."

Her anecdote about 'American Psycho' is also very good.

* Thank you, John M.

Take it easy

There are some real gems, some big sounds, on the new Julian Casablancas solo album, "Phrazes for the Young." Here is audio for "Glass." It includes the lyrics: Take it easy / There's no time to be mad / That's their job / Bite on their teeth / Death on their vine.

I posted previously about a New York Times check-in with Casablancas, who's gone sober and moved to the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles. Here is that piece again. Worth the read.

Pedro Friedeberg, master surrealist

Above, shot of an inside page in a profile on the "erudite subversive" in the October issue of Gatopardo magazine, Pedro Friedeberg, the Italian-Mexican surrealist. The Palacio de Belllas Artes is hosting a show on Friedeberg until January.

The piece is by Gatopardo editor Guillermo Osorno, who visits Friedeberg at home in the Roma and asks the 73-year-old artist what he thinks of Mexico City today (click after the jump for the English translation):

¿La Ciudad de México? La veo horrible, pero no porque sea más fea, sino porque hay demasiada gente. En 1973 había cuatro millones de habitantes, y ahora hay seis veces más. Está sobrepoblada. ¿Qué más se puede decir? Ya no hay contacto humano. Por ejemplo, llevo 10 años viviendo aquí y de las 10 personas que viven a mi alrededor hay pocas que me saludan. Yo tengo ganas de saludarlos. Los veo a los ojos y ellos hacen como que no me ven. O a lo mejor soy muy viejo y muy feo, y no quieren tener contacto conmigo. Yo no pido ningún contacto, sólo quiero que me digan: "Buenos días" o "Qué bonito perro tiene."

Friedeberg, who trained as an architect, lived early in his life in the Colonia San Rafael. He was a student of Mathias Goeritz and a contemporary of Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and the little-known Brígida Tichenor.

The survey of his life's work currently at Bellas Artes is outstanding. Highlights include his most famous work, the hand chairs, his "architectual" plans for houses and cities (or, as seen above, an orphanage for tehuanas), and his mischievous cartoons intended for readers of an early ex-pat magazine.

Check out his work here.

Susana Iglesias, writing from the streets

Mexico City native Susana Garcia Iglesias, 31, is winner of the first-ever Aura Estrada Prize, an international competition for young women writing literature in Spanish. Francisco Goldman, who organized the prize to honor the memory of his wife Aura, presented the award to Susana at the international book festival in Oaxaca City. Here are photos of last week's ceremony with other members of the prize committee.

I am happy to hear Aura's legacy is honored in this way. Susana is a fierce writer, with a sharp edge in both her prose and her life. We first met right after I moved to D.F., thanks to a mutual friend. We've been dedicated cohorts on these streets ever since.

* More later, including an interview, and discussion of the prize-winning work. Photo above from a previous post.

Light show and traffic in Centro

Above, a long soft shot of the Torre Latino illuminated by this light show that people are talking about lately. This is the same "espectáculo de luces" at the Zócalo that left Centro in shock-and-awe style gridlock a few weeks ago. Well, they brought it back, but still haven't fully solved the traffic problems that come with it.

I can't tell you what the show is like because I haven't gone to see it, and probably won't tomorrow night, when I've read the show is set to end, commemorating the Revolution. The nightly honking, sirens, and screaming outside my window; this feels like a preview of the holiday season ... and probably the next year or so.

Remembering mail art in Mexico

Above, L.A.-based artist Ruben Ortiz-Torres at the survey of Mexican mail art, at the Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico, Sunday, November 15, 2009. We were standing over the display of mail art by Marcos Kurtycz, one of those many figures in cultural history who, self-exiled from somewhere else in the world, submits to the seduction of Mexico, and then flourishes.

"I have pieces from him," Ortiz-Torres told me. "He would meet you, shake your hand, and give you something."

One of the displays includes an UNAM thesis on mail art in Mexico during its peak in the early 1980s. Ortiz-Torres identified two shows in a chronological graph in which he participated, early in his career as an artist. Check out more images here and here.

* Previously, "Mexico as muse for Anni and Josef Albers."

Friday night

This is Wawis, a disco on Eje Central just before Garibaldi. It's in the area. There's a "show." Caption contest?

In Celebration of hybridity and rebirth

While all this mystical neo-tribal psychedelic art-rock is still in the air, here's another band in that orbit that's worth checking out, Celebration. Above, Matt Goldman's video for "Evergreen," depicting some sort of crystal magic ritual.

Based in Baltimore, Celebration sometimes collaborate with TV on the Radio, which is evident in their sound. The spiritual overtones to this new genre should not go unnoticed. The need for universal rebirth -- in every sense of the word -- is obvious to these artists. Among Celebration's 'interests' on MySpace:

FREEDOM, green energy, mountain magic, vulture magic, panther people, Malian drumming, cave dwelling, evergreens, The harmonic convergence 2012, time travel, power animals, tropical fantasies, underground lakes, dithyrambic moments, group howls, "Hiawatha's childhood", copal resin, Chief Seattle, "The magic in your mind", creative visualization, mandala magic, japa meditation, bird calls.

What I see happening in all this is the formation of a horizontal and aesthetic kind of syncreticism, hybridizing many forms of spirituality with a hybridized style of music, elemental and earnest, in order to achieve ... well, let your imagination run wild on that one.

* Check out this interview with singer Katrina Ford, this interview with the whole band in New York, and this review in Baltimore City Paper.

The end of Lou Dobbs

Or, at least a lot of us hope. We can't emphasize enough the significance of Lou Dobb's abrupt departure from CNN yesterday. For years he had used the powerful platform of cable news to spread lies, distortions, and hate against millions of people living and work in the United States, sometimes leading to murderous results.

He pressed the bogus theory that President Barack Obama was not born a U.S. citizen. He completely made up some crap about illegal immigrants bringing a wave of leprosy -- yes, leprosy -- to the United States. And he almost called former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a "cotton-pickin' ..." before stopping himself.

In short, Lou Dobbs is a disgraceful excuse for a journalist and probably a weasel of a man. Almost more shameful is how long it took CNN to show him the door. In the U.K., they just had an intense debate over even allowing a known racist-extremist to speak on the BBC. In the United States, the racist-extremists have their own nightly news programs.

Cheers are in order for the people behind the 'Basta Dobbs' campaign at Presente.org. The end of 'Lou Dobbs Tonight' can accurately be described as grassroots activism gold.

Is Glenn Beck next?

Unattended ghosts, east of the Berlin Wall

* Above, a reader-submitted photo at New York Times.

A few weeks ago I finished reading Stasiland, an award-winning non-fiction book (Granta, 2003) about the lives of East Berliners in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Anna Funder, an Australian, recounts her time meeting and interviewing regular people whose lives were ensnared by the all-seeing eye of socialist East Germany, the Stasi, one of the "most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies in the world."

Funder gives voice to a people who were essentially cut off from the rest of the planet for almost 40 years, and whose ghosts were left unattended after all the celebrations of the fall subsided. It is a vivid and affecting book, written in an intimate but not overbearing manner -- a very hard balance to strike. She also writes about encounters with former Stasi spies, whom she found living ho-hum regular lives in a reunited Berlin despite having consciously destroyed the lives of so many others.

But history is always poking upward toward the sunlight. From Chapter 7, 'The Smell of Old Men':

Here at the Normannestrasse headquarters, there was panic. Stasi officers were instructed to destroy files, starting with the most incriminating -- those naming westerners who spied for them, and those that concerned deaths. They shredded the files until the shredders collapsed. Among other shortages in the east, there was a shredder shortage, so they had to send agents out under cover to West Berlin to buy more. In Building 8 alone, members of the citizens' movement found over one hundred burnt-out shredders. When the Stasi couldn't get any more machines, they started destroying the files by hand, ripping up documents and putting them into sacks. But this was done in such an orderly fashion -- whole drawers of documents put into the same bag -- that now, in Nuremberg, it is possible for the puzzle women to piece them back together.

Monday marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Check out more NYT reader photos here, and also this interactive feature showing sites along the Wall before-and-after the fall. And here is the special coverage on the anniversary at the English edition of Bild.

Gang Gang Dance in Mexico, bellybutton of the moon

* Above, Lizzi Bougatsos.

An amazing show by Gang Gang Dance in Mexico City on Saturday night. Turns out they didn't play at the Labor opening but at the after-party, in the upstairs space at Capital in the Condesa. Gang Gang went on just before 1 a.m. By then most people in the room were already high on the collective energy. They opened with an aurally terrorizing take on "House Jam."

Maybe the band was feeding off the native vibes; I felt like I was at a sacrificial mass a thousand moons into the future. By the time they got around to "Crystals," fusing tribal, liquid disco, progressive rock, psycheledia, ambient electronica, and unnamed genres in between, a different dimension was within grasp.

A mind-blasting experience.

* Previously, "The alchemy of Gang Gang Dance," "Control your magic," "Control your magic, Part 2," "A futurism: Neon Indian," "TV on the Radio: Aspiring to greatness and other glories."

Moms in Mexico City

Norma Hernandez visited me from San Diego-Tijuana for fiestas patrias in September. We patriotically drank and ate on a trajinera at Xochimilco, had chiles en nogada, and watched the military parade at the Zócalo, which was then overtaken by thousands of families with kids wielding enormous inflated pencil ornaments.

She loved it. Today, November 8, Norma turns ... one year elegantly older. Happy Birthday, mom!

The alchemy of Gang Gang Dance

There's not a lot of information out there and I haven't directly verified, but Gang Gang Dance is supposedly playing Saturday night at the opening of a new gallery space in Col. Roma, Labor.

The Gang Gang Dance name has not penetrated much in Mexico City yet, which isn't surprising. They don't do the sort of day-glo dance-friendly electro fare that is popular among Mexican scenesters right now. Their music has been described variously as "arty," "tribal," "transcendent," "ritualistic," and "hallucinatory."

In other words, it's some aspect of the future: genre-bending and alchemical, demolishing the lines between music and art, art and music. In a New York Times article from last October pegged to an appearance at CMJ, Gang Gang Dance were called a "band of the moment." Here's more:

Mr. DeGraw attributed the band's longevity to creative necessity — "it's medicinal to us," he said. But even after many years together, the members still struggle with money — subletters and happy hours are also necessities — and have an energy that will be recognizable to the thousands of less established musicians who are descending on New York this week.

Gang Gang Dance releases with The Social Registry, where on Wednesday the band's Brain DeGraw posted a Dublab mix. You can watch video of them playing live in Paris, via Stereogum, and at MoMA in New York, via Fader TV. And here's a crazy video with Ghananian-British rapper Tinchy Stryder at the always-solid tastemaker, Gorilla vs Bear.

If they play tonight, and it works, I'll let you know.

* Image above, the cover of GGD's first EP, Rawwar.

Freaks of Halloween

Here is jewelry designer Juan Esteban de Montserrat, and fashion designers Denise Marchebout and EGR, of Clinica, arriving through a back hallway at the Hello DF Halloween party at the Habita on Saturday night.

"Mexico has lacked a good Halloween party and we decided to do something about that," wrote promoter Naomi Palovits, urging the pretty and avant-garde scenester set to attend. While some of the DJ sets (courtesy of DFA from NY and Crosstown Rebels from the UK, among others) might have veered too heavily toward the repetitive bpm realm, it was still a fun night. Lots of good costumes, definitely.

Another occasion for the party was the visit to Mexico City by Super Super magazine, of London. The mag's editors and stylist Charlie le Mindu are giving a talk this evening at Centro, the Mexico City design school. The Super Super crew have been busy scouring the city for interesting fashions and locations to shoot photos for an upcoming issue.

We ended up taking them on Halloween night to quickly check out El Under and Spartacus, out in Neza ... so they might sample just a bit of the freakiest kind of nightlife available in the gran urbe mexicano. Now who wouldn't be inspired by that?

Tlaloc ate babies

As regular readers here know, I'm an admirer of Tlaloc, the Aztec 'rain god.' There is a rainy season in Mexico, so consciousness of its lord -- Tlaloc -- can be useful to one's thinking. But I must admit now my infatuation with him was pretty superficial. Depicted with fangs and googly discs over his eyes, Tlaloc is technically the god of fertility. Among his many responsibilities, he demanded the constant sacrifice of children to bring tears of rain upon the earth.

Tlaloc's appetite for infant souls is apparently well documented. Aztec priests believed the children had to be crying at the moment of death in order to appease the god, so sometimes kids had their fingers torn out, before the tearing out of their beating hearts. Keep in mind this had to have happened right at the Templo Mayor, thousands of times, near where the Metropolitan Cathedral and National Palace now stand.

A bit chilling, no? The legacy of ritual sacrifice in Mexico is not something people of any class or stature -- on either side of the border -- find easy to discuss. Personally, I'm still wrapping my head around the topic.

The Days of Our Dead

It's a holiday today -- Day of the Dead -- so some places are closed and the city is mellower. There are openings this week at the Jumex Collection and Jimmie Durham at Kurimanzutto. Gang Gang Dance is playing somewhere in D.F. on Saturday. That should be interesting.

Today I'm reading about an exciting act of defiance against state censorship in Mexico, thanks to the legendary Los Tigres del Norte, and also an illuminating check-in on Julian Casablancas, of The Strokes.

It's a familiar story of exile and rebirth: Downtown New York artist rises fast, burns out, and moves to an equivalent neighborhood but a mellower and more fulfilling lifestyle in Los Angeles. Then their art ... changes:

On Tuesday his first solo album, "Phrazes for the Young," will be released on Cult Records/RCA. Cult is his own, newly started and self-financed imprint, with a handful of bicoastal employees. He wrote and arranged all the music and played much of it himself. In Los Angeles he’s been getting a band together and prepping madly for a tour that will include a series of residencies with elaborate stage shows. Evident ambition has replaced obtuse ennui.

Casablancas sounds so positive and peppy in the piece, like he's 'gone native.' It struck me; a lot of creative people in California talk this way, about valuing firstly personal happiness, community happiness, and family, and rejecting destructive behaviors.

Do we need a term for this phenomenon? California Positivism?

* Check out some recent posts of mine at The Faster Times Mexico here, here, here, and here.