Happy solstice, readers.
Apologies for the silence here. I'm busy with work, final manuscript edits, and the World Cup. I won't be posting for a few more days, maybe longer, but expect stuff on Carlos Monsiváis, the Cup, my final Postopolis report, new music and photos, and maybe something on my new friend Xochipilli, above.
Bear with me in the meantime, please. (My hands hurt.) Thank you.
* Image via.
After a couple hours at El Chopo -- and a couple of liters of pulque -- we went east on Mosqueta till we hit Guerrero, above the metro Guerrero transfer station. Then we had to take a rest on the sidewalk, right in front of a Michoacana.
It's Saturday, 22 May 2010. And yup, it's still hot.
Heading down Guerrero, we met a friend walking an awfully friendly pit bull (pulque spilled on the jeans, teeth marks on the forearm) and some curious kids sniffing mona in front of the Panteon de San Fernando. In all, a good day.
At Chopo I got my copy of "Ciudad Rap," a collection of interviews with Mexican MCs. The MySpace page lists locations selling the independently published book, by Alan R. Ramirez.
* Stay tuned for updates on the upcoming Postópolis DF, and a piece I'll have out soon in a new media outlet in Los Angeles.
Above, an old hand-colored latern-side photograph from the pyramid complex at Giza, part of a collection of surreal-looking images from the Brooklyn Museum, via the eminent BLDGBLOG.
Geoff Manaugh writes:
The shots ... exude a stage-set quality: the diffuse and hand-colored light, the foreshortened perspective, and the cut-away glimpse into a world of subterranean vaults lending an air of surreality to the whole collection.
Overall, the architecture captured in these images is a mixture of deeply shaded, geometric minimalism ... wed with moments of ornamental grandeur, as hieroglyphic bas-reliefs, revealed by passing angles of sunlight, offer whole worlds of spatial detail. Stone inscriptions become less like something you might read, in other words, and more of a spatial experience in their own right.
Indeed, the images are almost unbelievable. See more here. They make me wonder if our planet's pyramids are in fact structures generated and descended upon us from the cosmos, and if we'll ever truly understand their essence and role on Earth. I'm not kidding.
And that reminds me. In the current issue of Celeste, the Mexico City art, design, and fashion magazine, I have an essay titled "The Pyramid Project," a satire in the spirit of "A Modest Proposal." The piece calls for the construction of a new Mesoamerican pyramid for the winter solstice of 2012 -- and that it be burned and destroyed. Why? We must mediate the end of the Fifth Sun, of course, for balance and survival.
"The pyramid is the flame is the pheonix."
This Celeste issue is all about futurism and the surreal. It features work by or commentary on Alexander McQeen, Pedro Friedeberg, Rem Koolhaas, Charlie Le Mindu, Jennifer Teets, and a fashion shoot by EGR and Cesar Arellano. It's a beautiful issue, right at the zeitgeist.
Celeste, now being edited by the D.F. artist Pia Camil, is published in Spanish and is available at American Apparel stores, as far as I know. Texts appear in English in the last pages of the magazine. Its website is not currently updated.
* Previously, "For the gods, 'all is play': Paz on the pyramid," "Spring equinox at Teotihuacan."
Posts were light this week here at Intersections. Much of my blogging energy is now being spent at La Plaza, the L.A. Times Latin America news blog.
Recently I've posted about Paquita la del Barrio's anti-gay adoption comments, and exclusive details on her upcoming apology, on the current situation in Chile one week after a new president is sworn in, on the crazy media slants on Felipe Calderon's recent visit to Ciudad Juarez, on the Ladies in White protests in Havana, and more.
Intersections might be a bit dormant for some time. I'm hosting relatives and friends during all of April. Mid-way through the month I'll be in Santa Cruz, speaking at a symposium at UCSC on "New Latino Discourses." The event, sponsored by the UCSC Latino Literary Cultures Project, will examine new communication models that are redefining "the literary" in the new century, according to the organizing professors. That includes the graphic novel, blogs, radio and podcasts, and hypertext lit. I'll have more on this later.
Meantime, I've updated and edited my links here, organizing them under new lists. I've also added a new advertising panel, via Technorati Media. Whenever I get a chance, I'll be working on updating my Journalism pages.
No matter what, this blog remains my one true love in the media maelstrom. This is the platform that allows me to interact with the world, and cover The Story, whether it's about art, music, style, sex, pop, politics, or the political-personal. My plate will never be too full.
* Image above via a new favorite, Timothy Hemingway.
In the current fashion-themed issue of Gatopardo magazine, where I am a contributor, readers can find the first published glimpse of my upcoming book on Mexico City, albeit in Spanish. Gatopardo bought rights to excerpt and translate my chapter on the hipster/scenester/fashionista community of D.F., as I saw and experienced it in late 2007, early 2008.
I gotta say, it's a juicy read.
The issue also features a bunch of mini-profiles on young Mexican designers working today. If you're in Mexico or anywhere in Latin America where the magazine is sold (e.g. Sanborns), get a copy and check it out! When Gatopardo.com loads up the new issue, I'll update this post.
* Above, Denise Marchebout, with a style like no other, from this post of unedited portraits at Cesar Arrellano's Diario de Fiestas.
* Above, a visitor to the Templo Mayor museum, with the ruins, Metropolitan Cathedral, and Torre Latinoamericana in panorama.
I'm about two thirds of the way through "El Monstruo," the new book on Mexico City by John Ross, right at the part where he describes the aftermath of the great 1985 earthquake. It's an important personal date for Ross. That was when the author and former Beat poet moved into the Hotel Isabel in the historic center of D.F. -- where he's lived ever since, as he so vividly tells it in his opening chapter.
So far, it's an enormously entertaining read.
Ross, an unapologetic "activist journalist" well into his senior years, offers a spirited people's history sort of take on the city he calls 'The Monster,' starting all the way back with visions of the first land animals and later humans who wandered the Valley of Mexico.
His description of the Aztec custom of ritual sacrifice at the Templo Mayor is especially startling:
Every year, tens of thousands of young men, brainwashed into believing the sacrifice of their blood would keep the sun up in the sky, were herded up to Tenochtitlán, lined up at the foot of the great twin temples to Huitzilopotchtli and Tláloc, and led one by one up the 114 steps to their doom.At the apex of the altar, four priests would spread-eagle the prospective victim upon the blood-caked killing slab while a fifth would plunge the obsidian tecpatl deep into his belly, burrow upwards through the soft flesh, and yank out his still steaming heart, holding it aloft for a fleeting moment for the sun to feast upon the bloody, palpitating organ and then stuffing it through the Hummingbird god's gore-encrusted mouth hole. Then the body was released, rolling down the stone steps to the base of the pyramid, where the butcher boys hacked off its choice parts and tossed the torsos into the canoes to be distributed in other temples to feed other gods. The leftovers were thrown into the wild animals in the Emperor's menagerie.
While Ross writes with refreshing passion and verve, his excitement sometimes leads to some light fact-fudging.
He says early on, for instance, that the Torre Mayor is 85 stories tall, although it is actually only 55 stories. Later, he pegs the assassination of guerrilla rebel Ruben Jaramillo to 1963, then just a few pages later, says it happened in 1962 (when it actually occurred, as I double-checked in Laura Castellanos's "Mexico Armado," the definitive history of guerrilla movements in Mexico during the PRI era).
These are just a couple easy examples of accuracy issues in Ross's book, and from what I hear, other journalists in Mexico have noted factual quibbles in some of his other work. Thankfully, the bibliography at the end of "El Monstruo" is extensive, and Ross is clearly well read.
In the end, it is clear that Ross knows Mexico City -- particular the story of the Centro Histórico, and the people who populate his favorite hang-out, the historic Cafe La Blanca -- as well as someone knows their own home. His "El Monstruo" is an active urban history, written with true love.
* I'll be posting more excerpts from "El Monstruo" later. Here is a strong review in the San Antonio Express-News, and an interview with Ross during recent stop in Berkeley. The author is currently touring with his title in El Norte.
Reclusive author J.D. Salinger and crusading historian Howard Zinn died on the same day this year, January 27. In honor of these two greats, Hilobrow offers a quick history of the United States in the voice of Salinger's famous young protagonist, Holden Caulfield. Here's how it starts:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is how the Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look and that kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
Read it here. Hilobrow is an intriguing new Web repository for the discriminating brainiac. * Graphic above via NYT.
I just turned in the edited manuscript for my book to my editor at Simon & Schuster in New York City. I imagine he's printing the damn thing right now -- all 195 pages -- and carrying it down those cold, symmetrical Manhattan streets just before leaving for the holiday break.
Who knows. New York feels like another planet to me. What are they wearing over there these days?
I've been living in Mexico City for two years and two months, with almost no travel away. Since the day I landed in D.F., I've been working on this thing. We still have to finalize it, of course. I've gotta do an epilogue, notes, and a reading list. Maybe some pictures and maps? But otherwise, the book is actually, finally, just about done.
The project, as you might recall, has been ... tough. Right now my brain is so blank ("I can't see my eyes") and my heart unsure what it should be feeling that I'm just gonna go to a mall here in San Diego and stare at things for a few hours.
Then, a drink or two? They've got good, cocky micro-brews here.
Meantime, above, I am entrusting you with my book's working "thought diagram." I had this poster hung in my study space for months as I drafted and re-drafted the manuscript. It's a very intimate reflection of my process and my values. In June, in ritual sacrifice, I burned it.
Happy Holidays!
Soaring through the sky in an airplane, as June Singer writes in the opening of her 1974 masterwork "Androgyny," is nothing to fear. Flying is being "suspended in the universe," she writes. "Since the universe is universal, therefore everywhere, I cannot fall out of it."
Here is Singer's primer on the founding of cosmic love, from the chapter titled "Androgyny as Guiding Principle of the New Age":
The idea of the Divine Androgyne is a consequence of the concept that Ultimate Being consists of a unity-totality. Within this unity-totality are seen to exist all the conjoined pairs of opposites at all levels of potentiality. Creation occurs when the cosmogonic egg is broken. Then the world is born. Or it occurs when male and female, having been incorporated in one spherical body, are separated by the supreme power of creation. Cosmic energy is generated by the surge of longing in each one of the two for the other.
Singer, who died in 2004, was a Jungian analyst whose great ambition was to break through the final barrier in Freudian and Jungian theory -- the liberated sexual psyche. Her "new theory on sexuality" was published more than 30 years ago.
Jung is in the air. Here is the richly rendered New York Times magazine piece on his mythical "red book," and an NYT review of the book's exhibition currently on view at Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan.
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,"
* 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.
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.
* 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.
* Terminal countdown: the Templo Mayor bicentennial clock.
Why is Mexico rarely invited to the world dialogue? Why are its challenges and triumphs rarely considered "universal"? Why is Mexico never grouped as "Western," or as belonging to "the West"? (Nevermind that William S. Burroughs tossed out in his novel "Queer" the idea that Mexico is "basically an Oriental culture.")
Claudio Lomnitz argues that this historical curiosity comes partly from a domestic source. Mexican intellectuals "fetishize" their national problems, or Great National Problems, Lomnitz says, and thus remain passive participants in the evolution of world history, unable to see connectivity to issues beyond their own borders.
This creates a bunch of black holes. Sort of like how in children's books on the great civilizations of antiquity, Persia, China, Greece, Rome are all there, as our rational ancestors, but Mexico is usually absent. Now apply that same basic abstract to globalization, or even the War on Drugs. Then take it anywhere you want. The yawning absence of immigrants -- those who abandoned the nation -- in Mexico's political and cultural life, for instance.
From Lomnitz's introduction to "Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico":
Mexican-born Lomnitz is a professor of history and anthropology at Columbia University. He is the gifted author of "Death and the Idea of Mexico," a book that is a providing a strong theoretical basis for portions of my own upcoming book.
How is that going? My editor has returned my foreword and first four chapters, with line edits. The hardest part is yet to come. But, taking a plunge, I am willing to now disclose my working title.
The book is called "The Lake of Fire." ... And, line edits terrify me.
BLOG NOTE: Intersections now goes dark for 15 days. You can still follow my link-sharing and observations on Twitter and Facebook. I also edit the Mexico page for The Faster Times. TFT is an interesting new experiment in online journalism at a time when the only unifying characteristics of our practice are experimentation and that great black void of an uncertain future.
Here is the door to an apartment in a shared house in Guadalajara, where we are staying till ... not sure when. The outlying streets of the Centro feel untouched and imbued with a romance found only in the best kind of modern Latin American novels.
At night, bands of revelers parade through the pedestrian streets, without any fears or cares ... till 3, 4, 5 in the morning. It's a freedom that used to define nightlife in Mexico City, before the smoking ban, before the 2:30 closing time. Honestly, being stranded in the GDL makes for a happy feeling.
* Tuesday night, we're checking out Chou Room, a week-long trade show of street art, fashion, and music.
* New York Times illustration by David Reinfurt.
I probably won't go out and buy the book "Free" by Chris Anderson, but I'll read free reviews of it, and gather pertinent -- and free -- excerpts for my future reference. I wonder if the author would be pleased to hear this.
From Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:
"Information wants to be free," Anderson tells us, "in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill." But information can't actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?
Good question. It sounds like a fascinating study of markets and media. The Wall Street Journal review of the book is here, and the New York Times review is here. Free to read, of course.
* Wait, the whole book is here! Brilliant.
* Manuel Zelaya, marching for his referendum, via Reflector.
What's going on in Honduras? Is the situation merely another living chapter in the eternal melodrama that is Latin American politics, as people like Francisco Goldman, Alvaro Mutis, Roberto Bolaño, and Gabriel García Marquez have all so eloquently captured? On the one hand you have a military coup and crackdowns on civil liberties, on the other you have an ousted president who wanted to re-do the Honduran constitution so he could stay in power longer -- and we all know how that can turn out.
Is this struggle any more urgent because it is playing out in Central America, a region that remains deeply traumatized by a history of U.S.-backed interventions? Nefertiti Altan, currently with the School of the Americas Watch in Caracas, writes me:
The school is directly linked to the current coup in Honduras, as the head commander of the Army, Romeo Vasquez, and Air Force commander Luis Javier Prince Suazo were both graduates of the school. They are currently ordering their troops to forcefully recruit young men into the army, attack peaceful protesters, kidnap and detain social movement leaders and to protect pro-coup media corporations.
You can email her for more info. In the New York Times on Tuesday, a newspaper columnist writes about the indifferent attitude to the conflict among most Hondurans:
And Mr. Zelaya, in many ways, is a typical Honduran politician. He began his four-year term in January 2006, and by mid-2008, the idea of a second term was already in the air, even though it is forbidden by the Constitution. Since its independence from Spain in 1821, Honduras has had 16 constitutions, as these documents were vulnerable to leaders' desire to extend their stay in office. The current constitution, which came into effect in 1982 after many years of military rule, was written to forever protect the country against presidents' overstaying their welcome.
The two sides have agreed to at least hold talks, and they're doing so in Costa Rica at this very moment. Here, Will Grant for the BBC delves into the relationship between Zelaya and Hugo Chavez. I've also gone to Roberto Lovato's Of America, BBC Mundo, El Heraldo in Honduras, and from Venezuela, Aporrea and Telesur.
The best analysis on the Honduras story I've seen so far, though, is by Kevin Coleman at GMU's History News Network, via a friend's Facebook feed:
In the magical realism of Honduran politics, the past comes back to repeat itself as farce. On Monday June 29, in a replay of the military raids on the Jesuit radio station El Progreso of the 1960s and 1970s (the Jesuits committed the grave error of walking with the poor rather than serving as mere instruments of the rich), the Jesuits' progressive radio broadcasts were abruptly pulled off the air at four in the morning. On Sunday evening at 6 PM, just an hour after the coup government's curfew began, a military contingent broke into Radio Progreso's headquarters. With fury and guns pointed, they shouted, "We've come to close down this piece of shit!" One broadcaster had locked himself in to keep broadcasting throughout the night. Shortly after, another military convoy stopped outside Radio Progreso. A group of soldiers approached the radio station’s guard and asked him if there were any people still working inside. When the guard said no, the soldier in charge told him, "If we find someone inside, you will regret it."
Read the whole thing. Zelaya sounds like a perfectly erratic anti-hero.
In closing, let's honor the citizen victims. At least one child was killed during the unrest at Sunday's dramatic airport aborted landing move. Lovato has the chilling "Our Neda" photo.
Currently finishing a major project, traveling, and starting another, online. An exciting but hectic week. * Posting resumes on Friday.
Amanda Lepore "is the Zona Rosa," David LaChapelle says in my interview with him, found right now in the April-May issue of the Mexico City fashion, arts, and design magazine 192.
She's "such a perfect example of self-creation," LaChapelle adds. "People will say, 'Oh, I reinvented my career.' ... Well, yeah, but you kinda look the same. But here's someone who was born a boy named Armand and mistreated and abused as a kid, who is now like this glamorous sex symbol. So there's something very transcendent about that."
I met with LaChapelle while he was in town for the opening of an exhibit of his work at San Ildefonso. He says in the Q&A, published in Spanish, that his recent "mural" series are "more understood" in Mexico because of its heritage of muralism, and that since he works mostly in Los Angeles, Latin American style and culture has always influenced him.
Earlier in the issue, I wrote an appreciation in Spanish on author Roberto Bolaño (see previous posts here and here). An excerpt:
Bolaño, en su vida y en su obra, estaba obsesionado con las historias, las tempestades, y las fallas de otros escritores. Los cuentos de Bolaño crecen siempre de la perspectiva de poetas o lectores apasionados de la literatura –- y casi siempre estos son jóvenes, idealistas, distraídos, y en caminos trágicos y quijotescos. Desde Amuleto, novela que trata de una jóven poeta escondida en un baño en la UNAM durante el tome militar del campus en 1968, hasta 2666 y Los detectives salvajes, que narra la historia de una banda de poetas rebeldes que inician un viaje, tambien hacia el Norte, para descubrir el destino de una poeta que desaparecio misteriosamente cerca de la frontera.
192 is setting a high standard for new fashion editorial in Mexico. If this issue is still out there, there is also an interview with Diane Pernet; a conversation between artists Miguel Calderón and Abraham Cruzvillegas, and collector César Cervantes; and a fashion shoot by César Arellano, with styling by Denise Marchebout and Lizza Freer, and assisting by Uriel Urban.
* BOOK NOTE: My Gatopardo crónica on the 2008 emo riots is included in the anthology "Crónicas de otro planeta," or 'Tales from Another Planet,' the third collection of the best stories in the magazine, covering the recent years.
The book is compiled and edited by Guillermo Osorno and includes pieces by Laura Castellanos, Salvador Frausto Crotte, David Lida, and Fabrizio Mejía Madrid. It's an honor to see my work included in such company.
What is a common Mexican euphemism for the farthest, most alien place you can imagine? For a place you've never seen, a source of both unease and infatuation? Carlos Reygadas, in a stroke of genius, is well familiarized with it. From my working manuscript:
The basic obsession that binds them all is the fixation with personal appearance, with costumes and masks, with communicating a culture through their dress. On the surface at least, the tribal scene here is so intense sometimes it can feel like walking in parts of this city must be like walking among the fashion-obsessed Harajuku youth of Tokyo.
That would be Japan's El Chopo. So ... are we almost there?
* Above, between red wine and atole with fashion designer Denise Marchebout, Thursday night, May 14, downtown Mexico City.
Two of the most prominent chroniclers of Mexican society in English had dispatches this past week on the swine flu outbreak in the capital. Author Alma Guillermoprieto did a "Talk of the Town" for The New Yorker:
"We don't see anyone," a very pregnant friend complained. "We're all afraid of contagion." In the days since the news of the epidemic broke, she had caught up on all her work, paid the bills, changed the haircut of her toddler daughter—whose kindergarten has also been closed down—and was about to take some photographs of her own belly. There's a small park outside her building, but, like all the other mothers, she was afraid to use it. "Am I bored?" she exclaimed. "Muchísimo! I imagine people all over the city locked up in their apartments, staring into the mirror, plucking their eyebrows down to nothing."
Author David Lida contributed a mask and cantina vignette for The New York Times op-ed page:
With no success in the pharmacies, I did what I usually do in moments of frustration and anxiety: I went to a cantina. Many were closed, but one called El Jarrito, which could be flatteringly described as a dive, remained open. The waitresses, short and squat, encased in tight skirts and suffocating beige hose, circulated among the customers. The woman who served me a drink lowered her mask to flash me a crooked-toothed smile. Customers laughed, argued, played dominoes and lowered their masks to drink or eat.
Things are thankfully getting back to normal. Today, restaurants and cafes reopen. On Monday, schools are back in session. * Illustration above by Anthony Russo for the NYT, where there's also a really good video up on the homepage right now from the streets of D.F.
** NOTE: Still doing low-impact blogging till further notice.
I'm asked "How's the book going?" pretty regularly, so here it is: This month I'm set to turn in the first draft of my manuscript, the result of a year-and-a-half of journalism and gathered experiences in Mexico City. Any day now ... as I stare at literally hundreds and hundreds of pages of raw writing, hours upon hours of raw audio, and too many dusty piles of books, clips, magazines, and fliers. Not to mention all those over-scribbled and abused reporter's notebooks. Or my "thought diagrams." (Those were a breakthrough for me.)
Editing, editing, editing. Revising, revising, revising. While working to pay the rent. While staying on top of the big stories and the little stories. While blogging. While trying to keep everything in its proper perspective. It's pretty crazy, but no one said this would be easy. There is no instruction manual for putting together a book, after all. And if there is, I missed the memo.
It's cool, though. My focus has consolidated. I've cleared away all social and digital clutter. As I repeat to myself: Process, process, process. The road over the destination. The work over the fruit. OK. Now let me just confirm it: this is the most strenuous task I've ever undertaken in my life. It energizes me and at the same time depletes me, making for a disorienting mental space.
At the same time, I am super excited with the project. I can't wait to share it with you. I've settled on a working title and the draft is up to about 150 pages -- and I see it at about 50-percent done right now. The biggest hurdle had been figuring out my role as narrator, and that question basically answered itself through the writing.
So with the blessings and guidance of all relevant spiritual masters, we'll get this sh*t done, as promised. If you've helped me along the way, many many thanks, again. But I'll certainly have more shout-outs in the near future.
An excerpt from the chapter "The Chicano Movement" in the book "Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds," by L.A.-based writer Gregory Rodriguez:
However, even among latter-generation Mexican Americans who are bilingual, Spanish tends to serve more a colloquial than a formal function; used more in private than in public. In other words, Spanish is generally not the language in which they feel most comfortable conducting business. Likewise, many business owners find the "kitchen Spanish" of many latter-generation Latinos insufficient to "write a memo or close a deal." For instance, in the creative departments of the Spanish-language marketing industry, "demands for 'perfect language skills,' bar most U.S.[-born Latinos]" from employment. Instead, the industry is dominated by foreign-born Latin Americans, "who have relocated to the United States as adults, often to pursue advanced studies, or who have had previous experience in the advertising and marketing industries" in their native countries. Likewise, since its inception, Spanish-language television has either relied heavily on imported programming from Latin America or drawn its talent from "specific Latin American countries, where 'authentic' Spanish speakers are often recruited to work in the United States." The same goes for the staffs of Spanish-language newspapers.
A provocative and interesting point. Rodriguez's book is an overview of the history of mestizaje and Mexican immigration to the north. He argues that, with rising immigration from Mexico, historical Mexican concepts on race will permanently alter the black/white racial binary that has been so deeply embedded in the racial attitudes and assumptions of the United States.
* But more on that later. * Image above via NYT.
From the short story "Dance Card" (New Directions, 2006), by Roberto Bolaño:
9. I parted company with Ejo Takata in the middle of a Zen meditation session. When I tried to slip away he came at me brandishing a wooden stick, the one he used on the students who asked to be hit. What he would do was hold out the stick; the students would say yes or no, and if the response was affirmative, he'd let them have a couple of whacks, and the sound would echo in the dim room hazy with incense. 10. On this occasion, however, he didn't ask me first. His attack was precipitate and stentorian. I was sitting next to a girl, near the door, and Ejo was at the back of the room. I thought he had his eyes shut and wouldn't hear me leaving. But the bastard heard and threw himself at me shouting the Zen equivalent of banzai. 11. My father was a heavyweight amateur boxing champion. His unchallenged reign was restricted to southern Chile. I never liked boxing, but had been taught since I was a kid; there was always a pair of boxing gloves in the house, whether in Chile or in Mexico. 12. When Master Ejo Takata threw himself at me shouting, he probably didn't mean to do me any harm, or expect me to defend myself automatically. Normally when he whacked his followers with that stick it was to dissipate their nervous tension. But I wasn't suffering from nervous tension; I just wanted to get out of there once and for all. 13. If you're being attacked, you defend yourself; it's only natural, especially when you're seventeen, especially in Mexico City.
Read the whole thing here.
Takata, by the way, is not a creation of fiction. A Japanese Zen master, he wandered into Mexico City in the 1970s. Jodorowsky apprenticed under Takata during this period, an experience which the filmmaker, actor, tarot reader, author, puppeteer, all-around modern-day prophet describes in loving prose in his fascinating book, "El maestro y las magas." If you're at all interested in the subterranean cultural history of Mexico City, the book, not yet available in English, is essential reading. ... Now, I wonder how Roberto would respond to this pseudo-attack of today. Probably by launching another quixotic quest for a 'true' answer ... ?
We're in the midst of a Bolaño boom. Check out this NPR feature on Bolaño's expansive posthumous popularity in English translation. (That's my voice reading the opening lines of "The Savage Detectives.") For a look at "2666," listen to John Powers here.
* Previously, "The misfit poet of the late Mexican bohemia." * Illustration above by Débora Tenenbaum.
* Talancon and Daniel Gimenez Cacho, recreating 1930s Puebla.
The resurgent Mexican film community was gunning for a 2008 foreign-language Oscar nomination for the period drama "Arráncame la Vida," but it was ultimately left out in Thursday's announcement of the nods. Hopes were up because the movie had made been named one of nine finalists during the selection process, the only final contender from Latin America.
"Waltz with Bashir," an Israeli anti-war "animated documentary," is now the leading picture in this category. Austria, Japan, France, and Germany also received nominations. Reacting to the snub in Mexico, the president of the film academy called "Arráncame la Vida" a "dignified representation of Mexican film." Director Roberto Sneider said his movie achieved its goals, and that the U.S. film academy simply 'opted for a different theme' in its choices -- mainly, contemporary issues of war and immigration.
"Arráncame la Vida," the most expensive production in Mexican history and a box office success, really is a fine film. Based on the novel by Angeles Mastretta, it has been hailed for its lush recreation of 1930s, 1940s Mexico and its faithful interpretation of Mastretta's characters. As the beautiful and quick-witted provincial girl turned general's trophy wife, Ana Claudia Talancon gives an outstanding performance. See the trailer here.
* Of course, in Mexico City, you can get a pirated DVD copy of the film on just about any hoody street corner.
* Alarcon in Ghana, 1998.
Author Daniel Alarcon has started posting snippets of a sort of real, sort of fake personal history, in Spanish, at Etiqueta Negra. Alarcon, a Peruvian American global hepcat who has lived in Alabama, New York, West Africa, and Lima, collaborates with the Peru-based magazine from his current base in Oakland.
* Here again is my 2007 interview with Alarcon for LA Weekly, and here's homie's Wiki. Alarcon's upcoming second novel is said to be about an undiscovered ocean.
* Above, Gabriela Jauregui, reading her friend Aura.
The Aura Estrada Prize was organized to honor distinguished work by a promising young woman writing in Spanish and to celebrate the memory of Aura Estrada, a Mexico City writer who died suddenly on Mexico's Pacific Coast in July 2007, at the age of 30. The prize is the work of author Francisco Goldman, who was married to Aura, and their friends.
In September Goldman hosted a fundraiser for the prize in New York (which The New Yorker covered) and on November 25, 2008, a similar event was held here in Mexico City at the classy Zinco jazz club downtown. It was a memorable night. Friends of Aura and Francisco and prominent D.F. writers and artists gathered for dinner, drinks, and a fine performance by the Zinco house band with guests Seneca Black, Vincent Gardner, and singer Daline Jones. Several artists, including Yoshua Okon and Daniel Lezama, donated pieces for a silent auction. Selections of Aura's writing were read.
While it was a happy event, Aura's absence, the loss of her voice, was impossible to ignore. Yet what struck me most about the evening was listening to how truly remarkable a writer Aura had been in her life. Her tales are engrossing, animated, felt, elegiac, and they were read with a true sense of pleasure by Gabriela Jauregui, Margo Glantz, David Lida, Alvaro Enrigue, and Maria Aura. In his welcoming to the night, Goldman referred to himself as the "luckiest guy in the world" for having shared so much with Aura. His prize is a living memorial to that love and to the promise of Aura Estrada's talent.
* Francisco tells me about $140,000 of the $200,000 goal has been raised for the prize. The first award will be presented at the upcoming Oaxaca Book Fair. Goldman also says: "Almadia of Oaxaca will be publishing a book of Aura's writings, and in a forthcoming issue of Zoetrope, guest edited by Daniel Alarcón, on young Latin American fiction, Aura's story 'An Open Secret' will appear -- currently being translated por tu servidor."
** To learn how to donate or apply, and for other news, visit the website.
The industry blog GalleyCat is up right now with a series of posts for every month of 2008 breaking down more or less the major news in publishing as it happened. And what a year. Lay-offs, lawsuits, fabrication scandals; you'd think it was newspapers!
For a writer, having to ponder this stuff is not ideal. But even from my perch here in Mexico, plugging away far from the New York bubble, we were also negatively affected last year by the chaos of the U.S. media market. Don't worry. My book on Mexico City is still on its way. Delivery date has been pushed back some, however. If all goes well and there are no more unpleasant surprises, expect to see my title in early to mid 2010.
* Just accidentally broke a plate. To start a new year, that's good luck, right?
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