Intersections

Estrella Cercana: A newspaper's obituary, Part 4

** ... Continued from previous post [or start with Part 1, then 2, then 3].

And here is some of the cool shit we got around to publishing in six lil issues of 8-pages each!

This was the best part of the entire Estrella Cercana operation, I think. We turned into a platform for fresh and interesting work, intersecting on the printed page across text and image, and often in interaction with pieces in the "Distant Star" show at the gallery.

We had no editorial guidelines from our publisher, the Kuris. The sky was the limit.

And as things came in, we went with the most Newsy stuff possible. Inevitably, this led to some criticisms about whether there was too much death, exploitation, violence, abuse, loathing, shock-value, guns, fascism, skin, dirty sex, and politics in our pages.

Our response, inevitably, was, 'Duh.' This is a NEWSpaper. (But with pseudonyms at work, yes.) We published, and please stay with me, the following ...

Estrella Cercana: A newspaper's obituary, Part 3

** ... Continued from previous post.

The launch of a project without an immediate precedent -- in this case, an experimental newspaper with a six-week life-span -- is never smooth. The team had to establish a working schedule that could form around our already-busy lives. We had to communicate to our collaborators what we wanted but didn't have a model to show them yet. And we had to settle on a printer.

From a year of service leading the campus paper at Berkeley (props to anyone who does it; the Daily Cal is a 15,000-circ., city-serving, five-days-a-week, totally independent operation), I knew we had to establish a solid working relationship with the imprenta Homero found and eventually hired.

One evening early on, we went to visit and personally introduce ourselves at Litografía HEVA, near Tlatelolco. We arrived on a bad footing from the get-go.

The first issue was delayed by several days due to a serious printing error in the first-run of the first issue. We couldn't introduce Estrella Cercana to our readers with huge black marks over some of the images, as the first-run turned out, and we had to convince Señor Felipe, our man at HEVA, that the printer needed to make a second-run for us. For free.

Don Felipe was cool. Chilango to the core, but cool. About fifteen years ago, he told us, he lost half of his left-hand index finger in an accident on a large cutting machine in the workshop. (See Don Felipe standing with that machine here, and his half-finger here.) We checked out machines and techniques that now only exist in analog-era journalists' nostalgic memories: off-set, movable types, plates, inks!, etc.

During the visit, Don Felipe made a weird and slightly offensive comment that ended becoming something of a calling card for us, "Este periódico no es para familias ni para gente honesta." ("This newspaper isn't for families or for honest people.")

Huh?

Our work schedule also proved challenging. Everyone on board was good for the project because we're the sort of people who are constantly juggling several projects at once. (I work as a news assistant in the Mexico City bureau of the L.A. Times, contributing regularly to the World Now blog.) We decided we would work whenever possible at the Kurimanzutto space, an environment which I ended up developing a strong admiration for, it's so well-done, or at our home offices.

Yet over the six hectic and crazied weeks, the design and editorial team never quite pinned down a reliable schedule. We worked together a few nights a week whenever we could, and rushed through galley edits at the last minute in order to meet our weekly Thursday (... or Friday...) printing deadline.

This kind of pace meant we had limited time to engage with collaborators. We needed pieces to come in clean and sharp, as ready for publication as possible. A couple things we commissioned, especially for the most "relevant" and up-to-date news reports we carried (Beyonce's baby-bump, for example, or Justin Bieber's visit to DF).

We also, you might've noticed, permitted writers to submit pieces under psuedonyms, making for a lot of unusual fun fun fun.

** Part 4, next.

(* Photo above, inside Litografía HEVA, by @demomilton.)

Estrella Cercana: A newspaper's obituary, Part 2 *

** ... Continued from previous post.

And here's how the team came together.

Homero would be in charge of the production process -- lining up the budgets, locating and contracting the printer, developing an advertising plan, handling all the transactions with advertisers and payments with collaborators, and building a distribution map. It's a huge task over-all. See this recent piece Homer wrote for Tomo.

Alberto, designer behind the Soma site, among others, would be in charge of devising a design scheme and laying out each issue. We looked at Mexican tabloids and Cuban party newspapers he acquired on a visit there. We picked fonts. Alberto subcontracted an assistant design editor, Adiranne Montemayor, also an architect. Then we brought on Javier "Coco" Rivero, the brain behind Writers & Kitties, as copy editor. (It sounds way better as corrector de estilo.)

Coco's job was to review pitches as they came in to a general email address, recommend them to me to read and edit, line-edit stuff we'd want in the paper, and handle any big edits directly with the writers. A key point for me, after the traumas suffered freelancing through la crisis, was insisting early on that contributed pieces to the paper had to be paid, like in "real life." It's the principle. Kuri agreed.

Things started rolling. We bought the Web domains, opened a Twitter, found a printer (a testy old man in the Col. Guerrero, but that's another post), hired a web manager with Rodrigo Escandon, and hired Jeromino Jimenez (aka Ñaka Ñaka) to design a unique banner background for each issue's nameplate. Online, these would be .gifs. Yay.

The gallery gave us a budget for six issues at eight pages, with four pages in color. The core editorial team decided we would reserve the centerfold, known in the old-school as a double-truck, for a strong visual display, like a poster readers might want to keep. The back page would be called FUN FUN FUN, and would be jammed with random newspaper diversion bits, like horoscopes, gossip and such. The back-page would also include the print announcement for our carefully curated audio downloads. (More on that later.)

Then, we put out the call for pitches. Here's my Intersections post announcing the launch of the project. 

This was to become the hardest part while getting started, establishing and nurturing the paper's editorial voice and character -- fast. We wanted Estrella Cercana to operate as a refraction, an interpretation, or a decoding of a "traditional" newspaper. We wanted stories and works to have a degree of intimacy or relevancy, no matter the genre or format. News for you and me.

Thankfully, weeks before, the Monterrey journalist Diego Enrique Osorno had published on a Gatopardo blog a "manifesto for infrarrealist journalism." This piece, re-published with Osorno's permission in the first issue of Estrella Cercana, became our anchor text, our baseline.

One part says:

Hagamos un encuentro nacional de jóvenes escritores militarizados o de jóvenes escritores zetas. Si algún imbécil menciona
los treinta mil,
o cuarenta mil,
o cincuenta mil,
o sesenta mil,
o setenta mil,
o noventa mil,
o cien mil muertos,
entonces hagamos algo extra: escribamos una columna de opinión defendiendo a las instituciones o leamos un haikú de guerra en el Zócalo al final de la marcha; cantemos el himno nacional o un narcocorrido antes de que comience la próxima sesión de nuestro taller literario.

Next, it came time to make to the first issue and get it out there. This initial process, as satisfying as it was, came with some ... setbacks.

** ... Part 3, next.

(* Click on the image for a larger view of one of Carolyn Castaño's Narcovenus works. * Post slightly edited)

Estrella Cercana: A newspaper's obituary, Part 1

It's been nearly a month since the final edition of the "periódico con fin de vida," Estrella Cercana at kurimanzutto, and I've barely had time to regroup, review, and evaluate the project.

This week's series of posts is an attempt to do that.

So, from the beginning, Estrella Cercana emerged as a response to an invitation from Jose Kuri to propose some kind of intervention at the gallery. He had read "Down & Delirious in Mexico City" and liked it. The invitation was open and I tossed around ideas here and there with friends, but nothing concrete ever settled. Time passed.

One evening in early September after work, I met up with two architects for drinks at a cantina in San Miguel Chapultepec. I told them about Kuri's invite. Alberto Bustamante and Homero Fernandez and I came up with the idea for a "literary newspaper" that would accompany the gallery's show "Distant Star." The group show, co-produced with Regen Projects in Los Angeles, was titled after Roberto Bolaño's novella "Estrella Distante."

The name of the newspaper came almost instantly: Estrella Cercana. We thought the image of a nearing star was futuristic, apocalyptic, semi-cultish, and very "newsworthy"; or in other words, evoking cultural codes weighing heavily on the zeitgeist as we approach 2012.

Kuri immediately said Yes.

What did we get ourselves into, though? Activating a newspaper -- a newsroom, with different writers in different places, a design operation, an advertising operation, a publishing operation, a printer, a budget, a team -- was not going to be easy. And, crucially, we all had normal day jobs.

It also sounded like an opportunity not to be missed.

We settled on a weekly. We met with the gallery to discuss logistics and consider what ended up being a totally generous budget, a deep sign of trust, I'd say. Kuri wanted the intervention to be good. We were in agreement.

Why not?

Who isn't down to work with a new, fresh group of people on a wild creative project? Thus, the team started coming together.

** ... Part 2, next.

A 'Mexico City Cafe' in 1950s Los Angeles?

Remember Mexico City in the 1940s? Here's another good one.

Via LAObserved, this is an L.A. Public Library photograph showing the intersection of 1st Street and Broadway in downtown L.A., with a view of the corner where the gloomy Times Mirror corporate building now stands.

That's on the block that is sometimes gallantly known as Times Mirror Square, the headquarters of the once-storied L.A. Times company, where I went to work between 2002 and 2006 (and work now again, from farther away). In 1954, it looked like this. Look closely. There's a sign for a "Mexico City Cafe" in the mid-right, near the woman's head.

Come again? A place called Mexico City Cafe in downtown Los Angeles in the 1950s? Boggles the mind. A quick search turned up zero, and I'm left wondering and imagining ... Who founded it? How long was it there? What did this place look like inside? What was on the menu?

How did regular downtown Angelenos in the period respond to and interact with this cipher from its future "sister city"? Did LAT staffers or City Hall workers take lunch there? Did they like it? And, what are the cafe's ghosts?

This calls for a Serious Investigation. Mike Davis?

** EXTRA: Zocalo Public Square, another of my writing homes, asked this week, "What Movie (Besides Chinatown) Best Captures L.A.?" I thought of this one.

AMLO takes the presidential nomination from Ebrard

** Originally published at World Now:

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the presidential candidate who refused to accept defeat in 2006, once more claimed the nomination of the Mexican left in next year's election, while Mexico City's dynamic mayor, fellow leftist Marcelo Ebrard, agreed to relinquish his long-standing presidential aspirations, at least for now.

Lopez Obrador's return to the presidential fray established the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, and a couple of small leftist allies, as the first of Mexico's three major political camps to choose a candidate for 2012.

Ebrard will have to wait at least until 2018.

Lopez Obrador, a former mayor of Mexico City, appeared to win a poll co-commissioned by both factions that would determine the PRD coalition candidate, and that both sides vowed to honor. Parties have until Friday to file for a coalition ticket, which is considered the only option for the badly divided left to mount a campaign that might challenge the resurgent Institutional Revolutionary Party, the formerly ruling PRI.

The poll results, released in a news conference Tuesday, showed Lopez Obrador winning three of five questions asked of 6,000 random Mexicans.

Ebrard's camp tried to argue in recent months that only he could draw in undecided voters next year and possibly win the first modern presidency for Mexico's left. A repeat Lopez Obrador candidacy, Ebrard's supporters also argued, would turn off voters who remain displeased with his handling of the aftermath of the disputed 2006 race.

"We could argue that we are basically tied, we could argue that I haven't had a media campaign [like Lopez Obrador]," Ebrard said at the joint news conference announcing the poll results. "The left divided will just fall into the precipice. I accept the results of this poll. I am loyal."

The two men shook hands and posed for news cameras, promising reconciliation.

"Marcelo is an exceptional political leader, extraordinary," Lopez Obrador said to applause. "Marcelo is giving us a lesson as a human being and as a politician.... We will build a wide progressive front."

Lopez Obrador lost the 2006 election by about half a percentage point to President Felipe Calderon of the conservative National Action Party, results which Lopez Obrador never accepted and dubbed a "fraud." The candidate shut down major streets in Mexico City for weeks in protest, a strategy that lost him large chunks of support among the general population.

Despite this, his base remains passionate and devoted. On Tuesday outside the downtown Hilton, where the news conference took place, rowdy supporters hoisted signs for Lopez Obrador and chanted and cheered, while a woman passing by shouted, "This time we will win, señor!"

* Photo: Reuters

Mexico detains man over tweet alluding to Blake Mora crash

** Originally published at World Now:

A Mexican Twitter user was detained and questioned by federal investigators about a message on the social media site that seemed to allude to the helicopter crash that killed Mexico's interior minister, Francisco Blake Mora.

The tweet by @mareoflores appeared Thursday, a day before the suspected accident that killed Blake and seven others, and referred to the 2008 Learjet crash that killed a previous interior minister, Juan Camilo Mouriño.

That accident also occurred in early November and its anniversary was a source of buzz among Mexican social media users in the days before Friday's crash.

"I haven't left work so early since the fall of Mouriño's plane," the tweet said. "Be careful, flying officials."

The federal attorney general's office said it detained the Twitter user Sunday under its duty to "exhaust all lines of investigation" in the Blake crash. A spokeswoman said Monday that the user was found by the agency's cyber-police unit.

Identified as a 26-year-old publicist named Mario Flores, the latest tuitero to enter the news in Mexico said in interviews Monday that agents dressed in civilian clothing approached him in his Mexico City driveway, tackled him and pushed him into a civilian vehicle. He said he was taken to meet investigators and was in custody for eight hours.

After his release Sunday night, Flores was greeted with news cameras and cheers outside an attorney general's office building in the capital (link in Spanish). Flores said he told authorities that the tweet was a coincidence and that it was rooted in his experience living through the 2008 Mouriño crash, which occurred just a few blocks from his place of work.

"It's in the collective consciousness," Flores said in a radio interview with journalist Carmen Aristegui (link and audio in Spanish). "It's the same way that Americans still talk about 9/11."

Flores joins a growing list of social media users in Mexico who have been targeted by criminals or government authorities for messages posted on Twitter.

In the border city of Nuevo Laredo, a string of grisly unsolved killings is spreading fear among Twitter users who keep one another informed on criminal activity. This year, two social media users in Veracruz became a political flash point after they were jailed over tweets that state authorities said spread rumor and panic.

And in the hours after the Friday helicopter crash, the Twitter user @morf0 became a brief media sensation when a message of his seemed to predict the Blake crash, saying: "Tomorrow on 11/11, a secretary will fall out of the sky."

For his part, Flores said Monday that Twitter users should be protected, not targeted, by authorities.

"I am a user, I am Mexican, I just want peace for me, my family and more than anything for my country," he told Aristegui. "I don't want ministers to fall from the sky and I don't want tuiteros to be taken from their homes for saying something."

* Photo: A memorial service for interior minister Francisco Blake in Tijuana on Sunday / Reuters

Temperature rising

What an amazing video for a Brenmar edit. Now this is Club. * More here.

Facts also fall victim in Mexico 'social media' killings

** Originally published at World Now:

Four people have been killed in gruesome fashion in Mexico since September for posting about drug cartels on social-media websites, the headlines and news reports say.

Trouble is, the reports could be wrong.

Information is the latest battleground in Mexico's drug war, as a string of brutal deaths in the northern border city of Nuevo Laredo has produced alarming reports that social networks are under attack by the infamous Zetas cartel.

Most of the reports, however, are not built on verifiable facts. And facts have become a rare commodity in many regions of Mexico that are dominated by drug cartels.

In each case, such as a man found decapitated near a monument in Nuevo Laredo on Wednesday, the victims have been left with hand-lettered messages suggesting that they were using Twitter and the local chat board Nuevo Laredo En Vivo to report on cartels. 

In each case, the messages have warned against cooperating with the Mexican military and have been signed with multiple Zs, presumably referring to the Zetas.

But how can anyone know for sure?

Marcelo on the drug war: 'What are we doing?' *

* That was another phrase Ebrard used on foreign media on Tuesday regarding the violent and abiding failure that is Mexico's drug war. (Makes you wonder what those 44,000 dead are worth, doesn't it?)

Marcelo is of course a savvy and capable liberal politician, with a top-to-bottom successful term as mayor of one of the biggest and most complex megacities in the world. He's cut from the same cloth as other orthodox (or unorthodox) Latin American leftists who prove their presidential mettle by adequately running a chaotic megalopolis. (They find it hard to win, though.) His opinion on the matter of drug policy is news.

The fascinating part is watching Ebrard attempt to overcome those obvious barriers: the great wall of angry old AMLO, a national public that doesn't really know who he is, and a gringo power elite which likely looks upon him with a customary suspicion. Post below. And the poll results are supposed to come on Friday. ** Updated, Thursday, 11:56 a.m.

** Originally published at World Now:

Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard says that if elected president he would remove his nation's military forces from the fight against violent drug cartels and seek a dialogue with policymakers in the United States over narcotics laws in both countries, which he called "schizophrenic."

"If the United States is legalizing marijuana and we're over here killing ourselves on the street over marijuana, that does not make sense," Ebrard said Tuesday, referring to U.S. states, such as  California, that have sought to decriminalize the sale and use of cannabis.

In Mexico, Ebrard noted, drug consumption is legal in small amounts, while production and distribution is not.

More than 40,000 people have been killed in Mexico's drug war since the conservative President Felipe Calderon sent the armed forces to battle the cartels in late 2006. But his government, in 2009, also proposed the law decriminalizing drug use.

Anonymous threat to Zetas, media, both falter *

* UPDATE: Fulfilling any decently skeptical person's expectations but failing those of info-war-mongers, including major U.S. media outlets and some heroin addict in Dallas, #OpCartel is basically a bust tonight. Here's my report from Friday.

** Originally published at World Now: 

A story that at first seemed to point ominously to a dangerous new development in Mexico's drug war was spiraling into confusion Friday as social-media users claiming ties to the hackers group Anonymous announced -- and then retracted -- a threat against the Zetas cartel in Mexico.

Some Twitter users who claim membership in the secretive hackers collective said they would be carrying out the attack against the ultra-violent Zetas by revealing the identities of the cartel's associates and businesses starting Saturday.

Others, however, were reporting that the attack was canceled and warned that the operation, dubbed #OpCartel, would put innocent lives at risk.

Adding to the confusion, the reason for the supposed cancellation of the attack shifted throughout the day. Did the Zetas release the Anonymous member allegedly kidnapped in Mexico, an abduction that purportedly inspired the hackers' threat? Or did Anonymous receive threats itself and cancel the operation for the safety of its members and their families?

In the dual worlds of shadowy cartels and shadowy hackers, there is almost no way of knowing, and no way of verifying such claims.

Anyone can claim membership of the leaderless hackers group. And anyone, in theory, can start a hash-tag on Twitter and call it an "operation" -- even before a single action is taken.

* Read more at the original post.

** ADD: Watch trailer of documentary on Anonymous at Wired.

*** Image: Gizmodo.

Teen DJ from Ciudad Juarez, Mock the Zuma, reflects a 'bizarro' reality

** Originally published at World Now: 

Kevin Santana remembers with a blank disenchantment the night he threw a party in his hometown of Ciudad Juarez and soldiers came to break it up.

It was in 2009, the young music producer and DJ recalls, and he and his friends had set up a sound system at a raquetball court and invited other teens to come dance. "There was nothing else going on that night and people in Juarez like to party," he explained a few days ago.

"They put us with our hands against the wall, made us close our eyes, they said they were going to rape the girls. We thought, 'This is it, they are going to break us.' "

I paused and asked for an explanation. Quebrar -- to break -- is slang used to signify killing someone in Ciudad Juarez, one of the most violent cities in the world and a sad symbol for Mexico's brutal drug war.

In the end, the kids were let go and the party was over. Santana shrugged and added: "There have always been soldiers in Juarez."

Santana just turned 18 in August. Troops were first sent to Ciudad Juarez in early 2008. Put another way, Santana has lived in a city with armed federal forces on the streets for most of his teen years.

Known by his DJ name Mock The Zuma, Santana is part of a loose generation of electronic musicians and producers based predominantly in Mexico's northern region that are attracting attention among tastemakers in the capital and in Latino-heavy cities north of the border.

Their cutting-edge sounds draw on diverse Latin American rhythms -- such as cumbia and son -- filtered through easy-to-access editing software that allows the music-makers to mix, scratch, and cut it all up with spacey and aggressive electronic beats.

To call them very young is apt; most are still teenagers.

Dia de Muertos en Oaxaca *

* UPDATE: My report from San Agustin Etla, "A lively street party for the dead in Oaxaca, Mexico."

This is a Day of the Dead altar in a home in Oaxaca, Oaxaca, just now. All the elements were gathered on Sunday at the city's bustling Central de Abastos, at the special tianguis de muertos.

The pulque and tepache stand was closed. Momentary sad-face. 

Over here, we're looking at how they're passing noche de los difuntos in Ciudad Juarez; by beating up protesters and photographers outside a police station.

Honoring my dead and all of the dead of Mexico. Wherever you are, good evening.

* Previously, "In Mexico, more deaths than can we can image."

The C4I4: Mexico City's massive new surveillance bunker

** Originally published at World Now: 

There are 13,000 surveillance cameras dispersed across this megalopolis, capturing everything in view, in real time and around the clock.

The cameras peek at streets and people from the tops of light poles, inside buses and over subway platforms, watching in the name of public safety.

The local government, headed by Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, this week unveiled an intelligence center where all these video feeds are monitored. It is a state-of-the-art "integrated" hub with a name that sounds like a futuristic space vessel: the C4I4.

Speaking inside the building's circular nerve center -- where 600 video screens carried scenes of residential streets and choked intersections -- Ebrard told reporters that the C4I4 is one of the largest and most advanced public-safety command centers in the world.

It would serve as a hub in case of a major earthquake, an eruption of one of the nearby volcanos or an outbreak of the kind of intense drug-war street violence that has been seen in other parts of the country.

All of the city's databases, such as vehicle records and home addresses, are at officials' fingertips inside the C4I4. Forty-seven public-safety agencies, from firefighters to the bank police, now have a single home base in case of a major emergency.

And every image captured by the center's cameras -- movement in the city's prison yards, commuters on the jam-packed Metrobus lines -- is stored for up to a week, making for a gigantic ongoing intelligence operation blanketing the urban obstacle course that is Mexico's capital. Hence the center's name, signifying four Cs (command, control, communications, computing) and four I's (intelligence, integration, information, investigation). 

Ebrard said the center would help "guarantee safety in our city."