Intersections

With street vendors gone, noise drops in Centro Historico

Mexico City's Centro Historico, the old urban heart of the capital, has seen a significant decrease in measured noise levels since the local government managed to relocate the "informal" street vendors that for years choked the stone streets and sidewalks. At the same time, noise levels have risen in the areas where the ambulantes were moved, the streets surrounding designated in-door shopping markets mostly on the eastern side of the Centro, reports El Universal in today's edition.

The paper adds a sceney sidebar about how dramatically life has changed for merchants and residents in Centro since the ambulantes left. People who live and work in Centro seem uniformly awed by how open and practically new the area looks and feels. But are the ambulantes better off?

* Pictured above, a D.F. gent on a Sunday afternoon outside the National Museum of Art, one of my very favorite in the city. The vendors in the rear were part of a temporary food and crafts fair.

Day of the Dead at the Zocalo in Mexico City

I arrived Thursday, Nov. 1, on a clear and gorgeous afternoon, just in time for the first of two nights that Mexicans celebrate their dead, and Death itself. Altars and outlandish displays were crammed all over the Zocalo and surrounding the Metropolitan Cathedral on Friday. Many in the city had the day off, so some streets in the Centro Historico were closed to traffic. People everywhere. People people people. Here's a view inside the cathedral:

Outside, ditches covered with heavy glass apparently offered views of recently dug remnants of the Templo Mayor, the Aztec temple upon which the Spaniards built the cathedral. Everyone was trying to get a good look:

In front of the National Palace, mourners placed altars for "dead" ideas, mainly democracy, and accused President Felipe Calderon of their murders. People everywhere! Walking proved difficult. Little kids in Halloween costumes. And in the middle of the square, rows after rows of 3,600 molded heads and skulls, hung as the Aztecs did to their captives. Savage, and cool:

There in the distance you can see the tip of the Torre Latinoamericana. I found the artists behind the heads and they called the project En el Corazon de Mictlan. Here's a close-up:

And a view walking back to the metro, to get back to Tacubaya, where I'm staying, to nap, rest, and prepare for the nighttime costume parties in Condesa. More later, friends.

This crack is hazardous to your health and your histories

The Colombian artist Doris Salcedo and her unreal crack in the floor of Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London is doing as expected, getting people talking. Blogger The Diary Of An English Courtesan describes it as "brilliant and devastating and hilarious and nauseating," which is to say worth seeing. The artist describes it as a symbol of racism and discrimination in Europe, so fittingly, it claimed some victims recently. It's there till April 2008. More at The Guardian. (On my first trip to London, in 2004, I checked out the Tate Modern's "weather installation" by Olafur Eliasson. It was pretty G.)

* Flickr image above by Greenwood100.

Forgotten, loopy pedestrian bridge in Chinatown

There's this pedestrian bridge across the 110 connecting Chinatown to Elysian Park and Dodger Stadium that feels, like a lot of places in the old core of L.A., as though it springs from another time. Took these pictures today, while I'm back in town taking care of business.

On one side there is the "old Chinatown" and on the other there are shabby boarded-up buidlings saved somehow from the razing of Chavez Ravine. The freeway rumbles underneath, a river of blasting air. In the middle, layers upon layers of crude tags. 12 in a triangle is apparently not as good as 13:

In the midday hot haze of October, it's nice, ain't it?

Nada pasó: Contemporary responses to Tlatelolco, '68

October 2 was the 39th anniversary of the Massacre of Tlatelolco.

Mariana Botey, artist, critic, and writer, memorialized the 1968 crackdown on the dissenters of Mexican society with a detailed silk screen print called "2 de Octubre de 1968 Responsables" (2004), partly reproduced above. The print consists of a government flow-chart that basically implicates everyone from the military to the president, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, for the bloodbath that left hundreds dead. Behind the chart are grayed images of some of the men responsible.

I saw the piece up-close at the Museo José Luis Cuevas in the Centro Histórico last year, part of an exhibit on art from L.A. and Mexico City, with an emphasis on the Colección Jumex and work done at Self-Help Graphics in East L.A by many of the great names in Chicano art. In its precise condemnation, the Botey print is an arresting piece of artwork.

Check out also this YouTube montage of images from Mexico in 1968 and today, set to a song by Panteón Rococó, "Nada pasó," as in, "Nothing happened":

* Thank you Harry Gamboa Jr. for the NSA link above, which details the CIA's surveillance in Mexico City in '68.

'The taggers have won': Graffiti on the 101 freeway

So proclaimed Ed Fuentes at View from a Loft after learning that excessive graffiti tagging on the '84 Olympics-era murals on the 101 led them to be buffed over in those hideous neutral tones favored so by CalTrans. See also LA Observed and Metroblogging LA, where Emily Banneker tempers her initial mournful post with, "Let me be the first to admit: I like graffiti."

My personal favorite kid on "L.A. Freeway Kids" (by muralist Glenna Boltuch Avila) was that ethnically neutral kid in the middle who appears to be jumping in mid-air, his hair standing on end behind him. See also pieces in La Opinion and L.A. Times.

Over at Ken Burns Hates Mexicans, Jimmy Mendiola links to an outrageous video of a tagger named BUKET from TKO bombing the 101 in broad daylight. In and out in a matter of seconds. Undeniably impressive -- except for the whole illicit, vandalism, extreme danger thing. Don't drivers pay attention to the landscape? A commenter writes, "Brave kid. I see special forces in his future, with a specialty in explosives."

* Image from You-Are-Here.com.

Patterns and tags: Advanced mature Barry McGee

Always surprised by REDCAT, even after the loss of Eungie Joo, I wandered in today to find a pretty massive installation by San Francisco graffiti and street art legend Barry McGee, aka TWIST. The installation includes an overturned tagged-up car, automated moving mannequins "spray painting" the space's walls, and is essentially wrapped in obsessively layered pieces of bright geometric-patterned wallpaper. It's titled "Advanced Mature Work" and it's up through late November.

McGee, if you recall, had to stand back as LACMA demolished a parking garage in 2005 filled with wall pieces made by he and his deceased wife, Margaret McKilgallen. See the above Wikipieda link and this post at Modern Art Notes. At the time McGee said: "I always thought it was a temporary thing. My stuff, in particular, I don't give a darn about. That's the nature of the beast."

Proclamations of existence for Iranian gays *

* Above: Marching to the gallows in Iran, 2005.

The president of Iran's statement in New York this week that "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country" may have had some kind of truth -- as in, yes, officially a homo-culture is not recognized there -- but I imagine in a literal sense Ahmadinejad's statement was news to men like Kamran and Kaveh, partners of three years in teeming Tehran. The pair did an interview recently with IRQO, or Iranian Queer Organization, and based on their observations it appears Iran has a pretty complex society of queerness:

KAVEH: Tehran gays are divided into two groups: south side gays and north side gays. Or shall I say upper-class gays and working-class gays. Working class gays are financially struggling because there are no jobs for them. If they do get employed somewhere, soon many problems arise for them in the workplace. So in general they do not have any real income. Parents will not give them pocket money. They don’t have the means to go to school and pay for books or tuition. For financial reasons they are denied higher education. They get teased in their neighbourhood and it is very hard for them to find friends. Most young people these days care very much about the clothes and brand names and so on, so that also works against them. The difficulties these gays face are much more intense and horrible than their rich counterparts. Rich gays are not problem-free either. Their parents usually give them a car, a home and money and say “just go and get lost from our sight”. Most of these people live in uptown in fancy houses, work in their own businesses, and continue getting pocket-money from their parents. Working-class gays often have liaisons with upper-class gays. They are exploited by the upper-class as fresh faces. After a while these relationships inevitably expire. This is a type of entertainment for upper-class gays.

Yup, no gays in Iran, Mr. Ahmadinejad. Thanks for clarifying that. And to get a sense of how Iran responds to gays it does locate and identify, click here -- unless you find the sight of young men hanging too disturbing.

* IRQO link. See also here, a proclamation of existence by Seyed Medhi Kazemi. And for more on the 2005 execution of two gay teens in the Iranian city of Mashhad, see Doug Ireland's reporting.

Los Angeles in 2106: Cars fly, drive, float on water

Weird, mesmerizing video by the History Channel on a future L.A. called Chlorofilia, after the city is geologically altered by earthquake and flooding, and "cars" are completely integrated into the "organic matter of the city":

Via L.A.-based Gelati Motel.

Found wonders: Marisela Norte's 'Sociedad Anonima'

The OG East L.A. poet and writer Marisela Norte has a show up right now at Tropico de Nopal gallery called "Sociedad Anonima." It is mostly visual, an exhibit of recent digital photography of found images and fragments of urban life captured by Norte, who does not own a car and gets around L.A. by foot and public transit. The show is "conceptually curated" by painter-photographer Diane Gamboa. Haven't checked it out yet but here is an interview with Norte on Uprising Radio, where she says that while "literature chose me," she recently "got the urge to take pictures again," and that in taking pictures of hand-made street signs, for instance, she finds a kind of creative satisfaction: "'Se renta cuarto,' they're always looking for 'hombre sin vicios,' 'man without vices.' Well, aren't we all? That's the attraction, words. Words words words, that's how I get fed."

Norte also says the title of the show comes from an explanation her father once gave her for the abbreviation "S.A." that often appears after the names of Mexican film production companies in movie credits:

NORTE: I remember as a kid at the drive-in watching these Mexican films, I asked my father, 'What is S.A.?' 'Oh, Sociedad Anonima.' I thought, 'Wow, what a beautiful pairing of words.' And it always stayed with me. Literally it means anonymous society, and what better name for the daughter of a former movie projectionist to build an entire exhibition or collection of images based on that, Sociedad Anonima.

HOST: So even the title is a found title, in a funny way.

NORTE: Yes it is, yes it is.

The show is up until October 13. There's a conversation with the artist on Thursday, September 27, a martini and film night on Saturday, September 29, and a reading on October 6. * Link for Uprising radio interview.

Frustrating stereotypes in merry marionette show

What really goes on inside that windowless white building on desolate Second Street near the old Belmont Tunnel? You can't help but wonder ever time you pass the Bob Baker Marionette Theater. Jazmin Ortega, a reporter at La Opinion who blogs at bilingual Eye on L.A., recently checked out a performance. She was impressed by the marionettes but dismayed with the show. She writes:

Fiesta!, the current show, harkens back to those old Disney cartoons of Indians with big hats and huaraches, spicy señoritas with castanets, and rooster and hens speaking with bad accents.

Reinforcing these stereotypes in front of 4- and 5- year olds is frustrating, to say the least. The show’s creators had a chance to break away from those tired clichés, but instead chose to reinforce them. Call me too sensitive, but those "ole’s!", the marionette with the too-big hat, and the skating huaraches were a bit much.

Which raises a troubling question that has bothered people for ages: Marionettes -- innocent fun, or essentially sinister? Here's the link. * Photo above by Jazmin Ortega.

Key word search: On the Canadian building on skid row

Here's the opening of LA Weekly style editor Linda Immediato's cover story last week on the Canadian building on skid row. I've never read so many of my favorite key words rammed together! It warms the heart: hookers, abuelas, action, storefronts, crumbling, shit, raw, dirty, scraps, hand-to-mouth, functioning drug addicts, benders, male crack whores, paranoid, delusional, imagined conspiracy, swishing:

The hookers downtown don’t look anything like they do in movies. No fishnets or pushup bras. They are in their 50s and 60s and look like little grandmas — which is why they’ve become known as the abuelas. They dress like secretaries and keep bankers’ hours, working days to cash in on a little lunch and rush-hour action. For years, they were fixtures at the perpetually C-rated greasy spoon known as El Trouble but whose real name nobody seems to recall. It was part of the Canadian, a building on Skid Row’s Main and Winston streets, which also held a XXX movie theater, an adult bookstore, a few empty storefronts and, on its two top floors, a collection of crumbling lofts. The Canadian used to be called the Birdhouse, because pigeons had come through broken windows to roost in a few of the vacated lofts; they covered the floors with bird shit and flapped their wings through the wide hallways.

By 1996 only three people were living in the building.

That same year, the owners began to advertise for tenants to fill the lofts. The raw spaces were dirty, most of the fixtures were broken, there was no heat or gas, and bathrooms and showers were in the hallways. The people who moved in were starving artists picking up the scraps from the boom and bust of downtown's earlier art-loft era in the '80s and early '90s. Living an often overly romanticized hand-to-mouth existence, struggling from painting to painting, freelance job to freelance job, no sign of a steady paycheck in sight, they came for one reason: cheap rent. At first, there were a few residents, basically functioning drug addicts, who were able to hold on to a job, at least for a little while, between benders. One, from a wealthy Santa Barbara family, was a severe alcoholic with a crack addiction, habits made worse by a slight mental illness. He’d often pass out in the hallways or hang from the banisters. Occasionally he brought home male crack whores. Then there was the bona fide nut case — he was paranoid, delusional and occasionally aggressive, particularly toward the female residents. He’d corner them in hallways when no one was around or while they were in towels, skin still wet, fresh out of the shared bathroom showers, to interrogate them about some imagined conspiracy. In his calmer moments, he'd show up in the doorways of male residents, swishing red wine around in a wineglass and making small talk in an attempt to gain allies so that he wouldn’t get kicked out of the building.

Read the rest here, "Exiles on Main Street." Also in last week's edition, my dispatch from a santeria drumming in Whittier for the orisha Oshun, "Oshun's Fruit." It might freak you out a little.

* Photo of Canadian residents Liz McGrath and Morgan Slade by Kevin Scanlon.

An L.A. Buddhism: Pay more for a copy than for the original

From the chapter on Los Angeles in an original 1980 hardcover copy of Edmund White's fascinating "States of Desire," borrowed recently with great care but without proper permission from Dean Sameshima's personal library:

But perhaps I've got it all wrong. Perhaps what I call hedonism is in reality a covert spirituality, a luxury that paradoxically confirms a deeper austerity. In A Single Man one of Isherwood's characters, a transplanted Englishman, speaks for Americans when he declares, "We've reduced the things of the material plane to mere symbolic conveniences. And why? Because that's the essential first step. Until the material plane has been defined and relegated to its proper place, the mind can't ever be truly free."

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I suspect Isherwood's character may be right, all the more so about the rich gays of Southern California. Their houses -- the lawn, the decor, the pool, the style of architecture, even the paintings of ancestors -- have been ordered up on the phone from the Yellow Pages. Once installed, the "unit" is maintained in the desert by irrigation and air conditioning. Nothing is indigenous to the locale. This sudden, violent importation is the exact opposite of the European's patient hoarding of accumulated, inherited treasure. An Angelean will pay more for a copy of an antique than the antique itself because the act of replication is essential to his vision of life as transient, artificial, and a bit droll. A Buddhist vision, really.

* Image above, "Untitled (older men, 1995)," by Dean Sameshima.

Be sure to pack that Rubrics cube

From a while back, "Man I Used To Be," by Canadian rapper K-os, who's also spent some lyrical flow on the "people of the sun."

'El Chavez Ravine' almost drove Vincent Valdez crazy

Lynell George got the Sunday Calendar cover with a feature on Vincent Valdez and the making of "El Chavez Ravine," a redone 1953 Good Humor ice cream truck he painted with a visual narrative about the razing of the communities of Chavez Ravine, eventually making way for the construction of Dodger Stadium. It was a commission for musician Ry Cooder to coincide with his 2005 album "Chavez Ravine," but the intensity of the project was more than anyone had bargained for:

The evolution of the neighborhood, from 1949 to present day, would unspool along the panels of the truck. It seemed straightforward enough, Valdez says. "I told Ry six, eight months tops."

Now, nearly two years later, the truck still sits. Lurks really. And though Valdez says that he -- as of just a few weeks ago, "at 12:57 a.m., Sunday, Aug. 5th" to be exact -- is finally finished, the truck sits in his studio's center space; his few personal belongings remain pushed to the margins where he lives: a crate of LPs, a turntable, a laptop, a trumpet case and a few scattered books -- mostly photography and history.

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"Some mornings, I would walk down these stairs and I couldn't look at the thing. You know those stereotypical stories of the crazed, dramatic artists who are just a little bit nutty? Well, some of those are true," he says. "I was locked up here for hours. . . always just me in here with the truck. And I would find myself talking to this thing. I'd come down the stairs and I'd grunt at it. I would literally say, 'I just don't want to see you right now.'

"I'd turn my back to it. It was like a partner. It was really wacky when you step outside and realize, 'Am I talking to this thing?' But worse, he admits, would be the imagined answer, "when even the grill opens up and says, 'Finish me. Finish me.' "

Cooder got the legendary Dukes Car Club to construct the truck for him, and got in touch with Valdez through D.F.-L.A. artist Ruben Ortiz Torres. The rest of the story is here, and it gets into some of the political overtones to the project, as Valdez notes: "It's an ongoing story. It happens to all of us, whatever you want to call it -- urban renewal, gentrification. It affects me, it affects all of us."

* The truck goes on view at the Peterson Automotive Museum in late October. Saturday night was the opening of Valdez's solo show at Western Project. A fun night, Cooder showed up and played with a friend of Valdez's with an accordian. On a visit a few weeks ago to Valdez's studio to see the finished truck, he asked if he could take a few pictures of me for some paintings, two of which are in the Western Project show. It was of course a huge honor and thrill to pose for him.

* Photo above by LAT photographer Genaro Molina, who did an multimedia feature to go with the story.

Leaving Los Angeles for a little bit ...

Gustavo is seriously too kind in this post at Navel Gazing at our sister paper OC Weekly but I can't say I'm not pleased and flattered with his announcement that I'm leaving L.A. for a little bit, a year, maybe more, for Mexico City. I'm sealing a deal with editor Colin Robinson at Scribner to write a book about the underground, basically -- youth and subcultures. I'm gonna do a lot of writing, a lot of reading, a lot of drinking and eating, and a lot of walking. My boots are my best friends. Participation does a body good.

Let me tell you about my feelings right now, since this is one of those things blogs can be good for. I feel blessed, elated, lucky, grateful, and also sad and nervous. I love Los Angeles. Every single day it manages to surprise me, to make me gasp. So much collides and gets mixed up here. The single-passenger automobile is ridiculous and offensive -- and that makes it amazing! The landscape, it tosses and turns, so lush and extreme. No two buildings are the same. This city is so shifty and creepy and deceptive. It's sexy. I'll miss it. I'm going to miss my family of friends and my editors and colleagues. I'll miss my relatives in San Diego and Tijuana and elsewheres.

That said, I'll definitely be back.

I want to thank the people I've learned from, the people who've encouraged me, the people who've challenged me. I want to thank Laurie Ochoa for letting me go to Mexico City last year to cover the presidential election for the Weekly, and my editor Tom Christie, and Alan Mittelstaedt for hiring me, and Marc Cooper for being the first person to meet me and tell me about the Weekly. I want to thank the folks at the L.A. Times who nurtured me early on. I want to thank my agent Katherine Fausset at Curtis Brown. And her brother Richard, my homeboy from the L.A. Times, currently holding it down in the ATL, for putting me in touch with her.

I don't know what I'm going to do with Intersections. Once I get there I might scale back on posts, maybe down to once a week, to concentrate on my manuscript. Haven't decided this. Head is spinning with the physical, mental, and emotional components of relocation. Alright, L.A., I'm out! Stay grimy! Thank you!!

* See sights of D.F. architecture, as seen above, in so-good photoblog Parella.

Sesshu Foster on cosmic metaphors in City Terrace

Rich and surprising and pleasing to the eye, Issue No. 5 of the stylish and socially conscious Journal of Aesthetics & Protest is out now. The journal is a collective, non-profit, L.A.-based web and print publishing project edited this time around by Cara Baldwin, Marc Herbst, and Christina Ulke, who write in this introductory editorial: "This issue is also an investment into our understanding that we can incrementally stand on solid ground through honest communication. We can get together and identify what is possible, to find where solid action within particular contexts can become real."

Here is the list of contributors. I'm listed among them, linking to my interview with Mexican crime-and-gore photographer Enrique Metinides. Enjoy the extended Q-&-A here. There are also some good web-only specials at the site.

Early in the issue, in an intriguing interview by Arturo Romo, novelist Sesshu Foster has this to say about his hometown hood of City Terrace:

The 14 lane section of the 10 freeway that runs through the City Terrace and Hillside Village sections of LA is said to have strange effects on commuters---melding of the senses, strange visions, unexpected heart attacks---what is your experience with this?

I was growing up in City Terrace when the state exercised eminent domain over the homes of friends of mine in grammar school and they were forced to move so that the freeway could be widened, to---I thought---16 or 17 lanes. Maybe the commuter bus lanes have reduced it again. If freeways are the petroleum-fueled arteries of our civilization, and you stand on the Eastern Avenue overpass at rush-hour overlooking 14 to 17 lanes, all a vast exhaust-spewing parking lot, are these clogged arteries just a poetic metaphor? Or are these REAL METAPHORS for actual threats that kill millions? Now that you mention it, my uncle blacked out for a moment driving on the 10 just before the Eastern Ave. off-ramp and a specialist told him he probably had a heart attack. As Dr. William Carlos Williams stated, "Poetry may not be news, but men die every day for lack of what they'd find there." Family practice physician (and major American poet) his entire professional life, the doctor practiced what he preached.

The journal is available to order online and is being distributed to independent book stores in the Los Angeles area.

Winner's Circle: Vincent Valdez's solo L.A. debut *

Artist and "San Anto" native son Vincent Valdez has his debut solo show in L.A. at Western Project in Culver City, opening this weekend. The show is called "Winner's Circle" and appears to be an epilogue to his celebrated "Stations" series, of boxers caught in moments of monumental struggle. Here is a good preview at Arts Central. Valdez has another upcoming debut that is truly exciting for the entire city, a depiction of the razing of Chavez Ravine painted upon a vintage Good Humor ice cream truck, a commission for Ry Cooder. I've seen the piece up close, during a recent studio visit. It is astounding. More media buzz on the painted truck is sure to come soon.

I grew up around boxers -- my dad was a fighter and is now a trainer -- but anyone can relate to boxing as a metaphor for the struggles and bouts of life, especially when rendered by Valdez's hand. For me, his new stuff strengthens my devotion to the words of Ishmael Reed, who once said, "writing is fighting." Born in 1977, Valdez is already a master of figurative painting that reaches beyond mere representation or narrative; he captures the unseen essences of his subjects. See "Winner" (2006) above.

* This post was updated.

L.A. gang glyphs: The golden age of 'placas'

The scene above is somewhere on Sunset Boulevard (I'm guessing just east of Figueroa), in the 1940s, found here. And below, the same block, 20 years later, the buildings decimated and the ghostly retaining walls now covered in gang 'placas', "mostly from the Alpine gang."

Both images are from this fascinating Flickr set The Golden Age of Gang Graffiti, which I found via stylish-cool Tagbanger. "This is, of course, still vandalism," the page by KID DEUCE says, "but from an earlier and more innocent time." Enjoy, especially the last shot of an elegantly threatening chola.

Meeting the Watts Towers, altar to 'inhuman perseverance'

A couple weeks ago Victor Merina at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism asked me to be a tour-leader for orientation trips across Los Angeles for incoming graduate students. Groups visited sites in East L.A., the San Fernando Valley, the central metro area, the Westside, and South L.A., led mostly by journalists from the L.A. Times and the Annenberg faculty.

My group went to the Watts Towers and the Stanford-Avalon Community Garden, one of the gardens that sprung last year from the South Central Farm. At the garden we came away with clumps of massive green onions, pulled directly from the soil by the farmers who showed us around. It was a really invigorating day.

Annenberg set up a blog for students to write dispatches from their tours. Here, Elizabeth Henry writes about the Watts Towers, which, on first sight and on every visit thereafter, are always spellbinding:

It might be a story of spiritual realization; it might be a story of psychotic fascination; it might not even be a "story" at all but more of a "hobby," born of boredom and without reason. But I believe that Sabato Rodia had a vision that he pursued in blind faith, without answers or reasons—like an Italian Noah for the modern age. I imagine that Simon’s diligent and almost inhuman perseverance was an "if you build it, they will come" type of situation. Who will come? That is the question. Perhaps aliens; perhaps God; perhaps just "other people." Rodia was an isolated, brilliant man who suffered – as we all do – from the anxiety of human sociability.

Read more here, and check out the rest of the posts at Riding (and Writing About) the Streets of L.A. * Image of the towers above by Elizabeth Henry.

Listening: Las Kumbia Queers, nena!

Re-done cumbia classics or cumbia-ized modern pop standards, re-done in a broke-down style by a band of "girls for girls"? Who could ask for anything more? Get to know the Kumbia Queers.

Anything to stay cool: Picturing a planet without us

It's too hot to do anything. I'm staying indoors. I've shut the windows. Shiner, the cat I'm cat-sitting, has been asleep all weekend. It's too hot, too too hot. All I want to do is imagine a not-so-unlikely future world where big urban frying pans like Manhattan are nothing but green forest, as seen in this startling illustration by Ji Lee for The New York Times review of a new book by Alan Weisman, "The World Without Us." This vision is so attractive I feel cooler just looking at it. Except, of course, for it to actually happen we'd all have to die. (The people at the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement have already declared, 'Sign me up!') Link.

* Noted: My colleague Judith Lewis blogged recently at Another Green World on the essential goodness of tap water, and on the evils of its flouridation.

Traffic, soda pop, house parties: How life goes on in Tehran

A colleague pointed out this cool photoblog from Tehran by a "former Los Angeles resident" that offers further glimpses into everyday life in one of the largest and certainly very oldest cities in the world. I like the tone and manner of the images and captions. For the above photo, the blogger says:

Two friends being silly and covering their faces inside Asr Jadid movie theater where we watched a horrible Iranian film named "Mask." I would say out of the 100 films produced every year only 5 are worth watching.

Under a photo from a darkened birthday party, the blogger says he's "a 79," meaning he's around 28 right now. Here, the blogger shows us "a jazz concert in someone's living room." The metro, he writes, is more modern than in New York or London.

* Link: Life Goes on in Tehran. Related, on modern and contemporary art in Iran, and Issue 9 of Bidoun: Rumor.

In memory of journalist Ruben Salazar

Today is August 29, just another day in late lazy summer for most. But for faithful students of history, Aug. 29 is the anniversary of the historic Chicano Moratorium march against the Vietnam War in 1970 in East L.A. Sheriff's authorities brutally repressed the demonstration, resulting in the death of trailblazing journalist Ruben Salazar. He was fatally struck in the head by a tear gas projectile while inside the Silver Dollar Bar on Whittier Boulevard. Salazar's death marked a dark turning point in the movement and in our city's long, unfortunate history of repression on the part of law enforcement, which haunts us to this day.

Killed while practicing his craft, Salazar's name is engraved on a placard in the grand main lobby of the L.A. Times building on First and Spring streets downtown, along with those of other Times journalists who have died on the job. I remember passing the names often on my way between the streets and the Times newsroom while I worked there. (This brings to mind the journalists currently dying on the job in Iraq.) Salazar is also memorialized at the former site of the Silver Dollar, as seen at ELAGuide.org, an engaging web project of guided virtual tours of East L.A. Here is the About page.

You can read directly from "Border Correspondent," Salazar's collected writings, at the California Digital Library. The California Chicano News Media Association now gives out Ruben Salazar journalism awards. His legacy continues to guide many journalists and writers working today. And will, I believe, for generations to come.

* Links: Moratorium wiki, Sonoma State University, Salazar wiki, "Border Correspondent." Read more on the Chicano Movement and its actors in Carlos Muñoz, Jr.'s essential history, "Youth, Identity, Power," recently revised.

* Photo above from the UCLA Digital Library. 

The magic of airport people-movers

Previously on Intersections, Canadian singer Feist helped us vindicate American Apparel. Now, she guides us on a magical journey on one very long airport terminal people-mover:

The video, for "My Magic My Man," is directed by Patrick Daughters. Here is Feist's MySpace.

Murals behind bars: The California of Alfredo Santos

Some weeks ago a homegirl of mine from school named Susie Ra told me that during a law school field trip she toured San Quentin, California's oldest and most notorious prison, and was struck by the murals in the prison's cafeteria. They depicted the history of California in lush landscapes and scenes. She was amazed and said I should look them up. Well on Sunday The New York Times published a piece about those very murals and their maker, a former inmate named Alfredo Santos, now retired at age 80 in San Diego:

In 1953, two years after he was locked up, Mr. Santos submitted the winning sketch in a competition among the inmates to paint a mural on one side of a dining hall partition. After inexplicably being denied the use of other colors, he began to apply thinned, raw sienna oil paint directly to plaster. Before long the warden ordered Mr. Santos to paint all three double-sided walls in the dining area.

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The murals chronicle not only California’s history, but also the evolution of Mr. Santos’s style. The first scenes, including an Indian village and the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra, are rendered in the listless fashion of a 1950s textbook illustration, with isolated vignettes surrounded by areas of blank wall. "At the beginning I wanted to be conservative, to please the prison officials," he said.

But soon vignettes crowd the walls, playing like a crazy newsreel of random images; at one point a covered wagon rumbles westward not far from where an owlish Groucho Marx  peeps over a movie screen. Unifying compositional elements — the World War II bomber that dominates the fourth mural, for example — lend a W.P.A.-era monumentality.

Santos later worked at Disneyland and then painted and operated galleries in Mexico, building a fine career as an artist. Here is the link, which goes to the International Herald Tribune in Paris because NYT links go behind their firewall after a week. (Unfortunately the IHT does not have the complete story.) The NYT piece has a cool multimedia feature that allows you to scan the murals up-close. They're really brilliant, like Riveras almost. The fourth one is kinda trippy and futuristic.

* Hold up: The SF Weekly did a piece on Santos and his murals with rich background detail back in 2003. Link.

Watching: Havana in black-and-white, after the fall

LACMA ain't all that bad (kidding). Tonight they're screening -- for bloody free -- "Memorias del Subdesarrollo," the landmark film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea based on the novel by Edmundo Desnoes. I've had the pleasure of seeing this film twice, first on VHS and then on screen at a museum in Mexico, D.F. last October during the book fair. I've not read the book but the film is an elegiac, almost impressionistic look at Havana in the period right after the fall of Batista, seen through the eyes of a privileged aspiring writer who stays behind instead of escaping to Miami. Here, of all things, is the film's Japanese trailer:

The screening is part of LACMA's Latin American cinema series. The Getty Foundation gave them a grant to do it. Read more on "Memorias del Subdesarrollo" at this nice movie blog from Chile, Vida en 35 mm, which says the film achieves in giving the viewer a vivid portrait of Revolutionary Cuba without the fanaticism of the pro- and anti-Castro camps. Previously, "Life, beautiful, under Cuba's kingfish."

* Later at Intersections: A note to commentators, who have been vigorously debating the case of Elvira Arellano in previous posts.

Shizu Saldamando: Drawing up the playful heart of hybrid L.A.

Shizu Saldamando, still 29, is a California artist who I believe embodies the leading edge of the state's long and energetic traditions of cultural and creative hybridity. A Japanese-Mexican American woman raised in the Mission District in San Francisco, Shizu's drawings and paintings combine, as the L.A. Times says in this recent article, "elements of traditional Chicano portraiture, lowrider art and pinta (jailhouse) art." Her media is just as mixed-up. She uses "glitter, origami paper, ballpoint pen, bed sheets, handkerchiefs, ruled notebook paper and plywood" to depict friends and people she knows living life in L.A.'s Eastside and Southeast. She works mainly off her own photography.

Saldamando's style is really unmistakable. You know a Shizu piece -- like a Diane Gamboa work -- from across the room. And you get a sense after just looking at a few of her pieces that her work is a real window into the lives of the familiar young rockabillies, rockeros and post-cholos/as of authentic Los Angeles. She renders their sense of romance, fashion, playfulness, and genuinely affected melancholy in a way that makes you feel close to the subjects, as if you've met them before. (Sometimes, you realize you have.)

* A show of new work by Saldamando is up this month at Tropico de Nopal gallery in that old Belmont-Westlake-Temple/Beaudry region of central L.A. Here is the press release. See L.A. Times article for more. (Love the image above but I'm having trouble correctly naming and dating it.)

** ADD: Adrian Arancibia posts a lyrical reaction to the show at LatinoLA.com.

Excavations: Pola Weiss, and 'evidence' of moments

There's a landmark show currently at the museum at Mexico's gargantuan national university UNAM called "La era de la discrepancia/The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1968-1997." This period is generally known as the era of modern darkness in Mexico, the turning point being the government's massacre of untold hundreds of students and demonstrators at Tlatelolco on a day of infamy for all of us, 2 October 1968.

After a little browsing of the catalog for the show I came upon a biographical sketch of Pola Weiss:

Pola Weiss (Mexico City, 1947-1990) is often called the first pioneer of video art in Mexico. Starting the mid-1970s, she produced various works for the public and commercial television, and she created "arTV," a term that expressed her belief that television was a possible medium for art. Her first work, Flor cósmica (Cosmic Flower), presented at IX Encuentro Internacional de Videoarte, held in 1977 at Mexico City's Museo Carrillo Gil, featured a sort of changing kaleidoscope along with a score by Tomita.

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One of her major contributions was the concept of "video dance," dancing actions performed for the camera. The dominant note in her work, nonetheless, was a search for identity, whether in terms of her origins, her body, or her feelings (Autovideato, 1979; Mi corazón, 1986). It is said, though it has never been proved, that she committed suicide in front of her video camera in 1990.

I wonder why this hasn't been confirmed, and how it can be. There's otherwise very little written or visual information about Weiss online. Here's the link to the catalog. Link to Freize review. Link to Arteven.com post. Link to La Jornada article and here. The show is up till the end of September.

* Sorta in the same vein, check the opening anecdote in Doug Harvey's recent piece in the LA Weekly on the Getty Research Institute's current show "Evidence of Moment." He describes an early encounter with an art action by "one John Duncan, who had bribed a Tijuana mortician to let him have sex with a female corpse, recording the act on audiotape. Afterward, he had gotten a vasectomy 'so that the last potent seed I had,' he recounted, 'was spent in a cadaver.'"

* Also check out this nominally related link at The Mex Files on one man's excavation of his Anglo-Italo-Mexican heritage.

Other thoughts on Inglewood's 'The History of Transportation'

Stopped by at the tail-end of "The History of Transportation" mural unveiling in Inglewood today. A local charro dance troupe was performing, but it appeared most people had already left. Not much media; the glare on the Southside this weekend is centered on the bad news out of King medical center.

Anyway, interesting things happen when you bring a pair of fresh eyes to a piece of art. A friend today commented, after taking in Lundeberg's 240-foot long petrachrome work depicting the transportation history of the Centinela Valley: "Where are all the Africans?" Most of the people who inhabit the mural's scenes after the panels that represent the pre-Colonial era and the Mission period seem to be even-toned Anglos. No black people, and no Chinese or Japanese. Then we read the draft information panels written by art historian Michael Several, whom I interviewed while researching my piece this week. No. 5 says:

Reflective of the period, many ethnic populations are under-represented in their contributions made to the area and to the transportation growth within the state of California.

Nonetheless, the people who were there today seemed pleased with the mural's prominent new home near City Hall and Inglewood High School. As we took off, a local publicist nodded approvingly and said: "Our mural."

* The L.A. Times did its mural preview in Saturday's paper.