Intersections

The captions will remain in present participle

He's looking at a sweater. He's looking at cotton. He's looking at rubber boots. He's looking at a door. This is what Tumblr is made for: Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things. I went through 14 pages and decided to stop (and resume later).

Above, he's looking at a soft drink. From the In Memoriam page, added since the unexpected death of the "Dear Leader":

at last the dear leader has quit this mortal coil. i have decided, nonetheless, to keep the blog running as long as my photo archive will last. i don’t how long that will be but i figure that if you’re reading this, you never minded the lack of good taste in this form of humor, which i’m very proud of, and the fact that he’s dead will make little difference.

i have also decided to make no change on the captions. they will remain in the present participle, as always. much like his father still is, and forever will be, the ‘eternal president’ of north korea, so will kim jong-il forever look at things on this site. well, not forever, it’s not like i have infinite photos of the guy, but you know what i mean…

you may tune-in as regularly as before, or if you prefer, join the myriad of successors that have appeared. or do both, if you don’t suffer from some form of attention deficit disorder, which i hope you don’t.

The author of the blog professes to be based in Lisbon. On Facebook, more than 43,000 people like it.

I know about the knock-off, Kim Jong-Il Dropping the Bass. It's amusing and all. But I must say, nothing can compare with the purity of Kim Jong-Il ... simply ... Looking at Things.

* Elsewhere, an amazing set of photos from inside North Korea, at The Atlantic.

Five years of Intersections *

Today, Intersections turns five years old. Wow. How did this happen?

The blog started on 20 December 2006, in my apartment in Echo Park, Los Angeles, while I was a staff writer at the LA Weekly. I wanted to add more context to my stories and also share stuff I've read or watched online.

As the days and weeks passed, Intersections began evolving. I wanted it to be about media, food, music, art, sex and sexuality, spirituality, fashion, film, politics, a sprinkling of sports, on the planet, on literature, and on the future.

Almost immediately, Intersections started making an impact on the conversation in Los Angeles, thanks to early inter-webbing for which I remain grateful. In all my work, I had to consider a new dual role, a staffer producing copy for the machines, and an independent voice, answerable to no one but myself. 

Once I moved to Mexico in autumn 2007, Intersections turned into a running first-draft of my book, the place where I posted an early photo, interview, or observation that would turn into a chunk or chapter in "Down & Delirious in Mexico City." Since then, the blog is where I re-post and share my reporting work for the L.A. Times foreign bureau in Mexico City, where I am a contracted news assistant.

The blog has also sometimes been a platform for righteously pissed-off protest. There is, after all, nothing more valuable for a trafficker of facts than the freedom to say exactly as one can conclude bearing all the information at hand.

Sometimes I've wanted to quit this exercise, let it have an expiration date. Even in the lowest moments of frustration or stagnation, however, I end up reminding myself that this blog is now a part of me, my web with the world.

Intersections was and remains about the cross-currents in our cultures, the bridges (and divides) that exist between black and brown, North and South, high and low, the Tribes, and the cities that many of us call "home" -- Los Angeles, Mexico City, the San Diego-Tijuana border complex, the global sponge that belongs to all of us.

Like, the blog has rights. In other words, killing it would be unjust.

The first posts inside the blog are here, starting at the bottom of the page. All the archives and categories are here. Thank you, readers, friends, colleagues, for going along for the ride! I hope you keep checking in with me through 2012 and -- hopefully -- beyond.

* Photo: Blending in at the ruins of Mitla, Oaxaca, Nov. 2011.

Despite policy changes, smog still afflicts Mexico City

** Originally published at World Now:

When you're above it, it might look like brown smoke. From far away at ground level, it can shine like a sheet of white ice. And when you're under it, which is most of the time, you can't really see it at all.

It is the famous air pollution of Mexico City, causing countless cases of scratchy throats, stinging eyes and mucus that looks like it came from outer-space.

It is, in a word, nasty.

And while it may no longer be known as the worst in the world -- these days Beijing's pollution problem is attracting that sort of global attention -- Mexico City's smog becomes particularly intense at the start of every Christmas season.

The effect persists even after two decades of aggressive anti-pollution policies that have dramatically cut down smog overall in Mexico's gigantic capital.

Last Saturday evening, while the mayor inaugurated the annual ice-rink downtown to kick off the holiday cheer, the city's contamination monitoring system recorded a high of 136 points on its pollution scale in Mexico City's southeast quadrant, and graded the air quality over the entire metropolitan region of 20.1 million people as "Bad."

The IMECA, as the scale is known by its Spanish acronym, has hit "bad" levels across the city all week since. The air is expected to be just as "mala" through December and into the new year.

The phenomenon joins weather, cultural and geographic factors that combine like in no other place, explained Armando Retama, director of the city's sophisticated air-quality monitoring service, with two dozen stations recording pollution levels around the clock.

The Valley of Mexico, where the metropolitan area is located, is a bowl that sits at about 7,300 feet above sea level. That landscape produces what meteorologists call the thermal inversion effect, in which colder mountain air hangs over the valley and traps warmer air and pollution particles below it.

In the mornings, it's rise and shine for many of the estimated 4 million cars and trucks that operate here.

"As the day goes on, the sun heats up the floor, and the floor heats up the air above it," Retama said in an interview this week. The air and the toxins combine, creating a haze that often transforms into ozone in the afternoon.

The pattern hits Mexico City hard in December, when Christmas shoppers and tourists bring routine gridlock to city streets. Confounding the problem, fireworks and pyrotechnic displays, popular during the seasonal festivities, add smoke and ash to the equation.

"We're producing millions of kilos of contaminants daily, in a matter of hours," Retama said.

And you can feel it. Those particles can include a host of unfriendly pollutants: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, even lead. Will it ever fully go away?

Not unless the people of the city stop driving automobiles, Retama said. Despite improvements in public transportation, such as the Ecobici and Metrobus projects, car exhaust continues to be the chief factor contributing to Mexico City's smog, he said.

So far this week, the IMECA scale has not topped 150, which would trigger a "pre-contingency" alert for the metropolis. That would lead to restrictions on certain manufacturing sectors and on outdoor activities at schools. Every hour, the monitoring-service director said, reports on pollution levels are sent to local government agencies.

(Online, citizens can follow updates on the air quality at this live-map or via Twitter.)

Yet on Friday, the metropolitan environmental agency released a statement reminding residents of the Valley of Mexico to take precautions against contributing to the pollution problem. Locals were advised to minimize the use of automobiles, chimneys, fireworks and open fires. 

"Oh yes, I feel it, especially in the past few days," said Alejandra Abrego, 24. "My nose is dry, I am coughing and sneezing a lot."

Abrego, an archeology student strolling downtown on Friday, said she grew up in Mexico City. In her view, the smog has actually gotten worse in recent years, not better. For a generation that didn't experience the worst of the smog in the 1980s, it might seem so.

"We need more efficient public transit, so that people can start leaving their cars," Abrego said.

* Photo: Sunset from the Buenavista transit hub, Dec. 6, 2011.

A place where Guatemalan day laborers are survivors of war

** Originally published at World Now:

A day laborer outside a Home Depot hardware store in northeast Los Angeles is riding in a bright orange shopping cart in the store's parking lot, peering through imaginary binoculars, as if he were on patrol in a dangerous jungle.

Others are crawling under parked vehicles as if squeezing below barbed wire, or diving and body-rolling as if evading gunfire. Before a sale display for storage sheds, two men lie still on the asphalt, their legs spread, as if dead.

The laborers are undocumented immigrants from Guatemala, and in an unsettling video installation by Mexican artist Yoshua Okon on view at a university gallery in Mexico City, they are war survivors playing themselves.

Before Okon's cameras, the migrants are reenacting their days fighting in Guatemala's long and catastrophic civil war.

The four-channel video piece, called "Octopus," is Okon's latest and possibly most provocative video in a career in which he frequently pushes against viewers' comfort zones with the use of improvising non-actors.

A native of Mexico City, Okon has also lived part-time in Los Angeles. He bought a house in L.A. and came to participate in a rite of passage for many new U.S. homeowners in the last decade -- hiring day workers.

The men he found at the Home Depot store in the Cypress Park district, it turned out, were indigenous Maya from Guatemala. They spoke a Mayan dialect and very little Spanish or English. They had escaped Guatemala's war in search of work in the United States.

Some fought for the U.S.-backed military government and others for the leftist guerrillas. Some, he said, showed him scars of bullet wounds. Now, as laborers at the bottom of the U.S. social ladder, they fight for scraps of work in the slumping construction market.

"They're more afraid of immigration than about talking about the war," Okon said during a visit this week to the exhibition space in Mexico City's Roma district. "To me, that's what the piece is about. It's the United States. The war is not over. The war is over there."

Okon, 41, has made films with wanna-be Nazis in Mexico City, an isolated family in California's high desert getting drunk on "White Russians," and Mexican police officers who agree to make bawdy sexual gestures they probably shouldn't in uniform.

While these works usually elicit in viewers a mix of chuckles and creeps, "Octopus" is different.

The new video is guided by a polemical stance, not self-parody. Home Depot customers amble past the bizarre scenes playing out with hardly a blink, showing that workers who build homes in the United States have "always been invisible," Okon said.

The artist also had to work guerrilla-style in some form himself. He filmed on the store's parking lot without proper permission. "I had to constantly negotiate with the security guards, until they finally kicked me out," he said.

Over two days of filming in March, Okon said the men from Guatemala gradually stopped giggling through takes and began to seriously inhabit -- or re-inhabit -- their roles. "It felt like a job," one of the workers later told the LA Weekly. And indeed it was; Okon said he paid the men a double day-rate for their time.

"Octopus," commissioned by the Hammer Museum at UCLA, will show at the Casa Jose Galvan exhibition space in Mexico City through January. Next year, Okon plans to take the piece toProyectos Ultravioleta, an arts space in Guatemala City.

A single-screen version of the 18-minute piece is viewable here. In one shot, as seen above, a motorist drives past Okon's cameras with a bumper sticker that reads, "Voter for a new foreign policy."

The shot was not staged.

* Image: A still from 'Pulpo.'

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 ...

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.

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.

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."

⟢ Estrella Cercana ⟣

Here's the site for Estrella Cercana, our experimental newspaper underway now at kurimanzutto. At the site, the main editorial crew and I are posting images and links to stuff we're thinking about, talking about, laughing about, cringing at, all through the production process for the weekly periódico con fin de vida.

We'll also be posting the issue's content on the day we publish, planned now for Saturdays through Nov. 5, as well as .pdf files of how the paper looks in print once distributed here in Mexico City.

What is Estrella Cercana, you ask?

It's a publishing project built around Distant Star, the show currently up at kuri, inspired by the literature of Roberto Bolaño. (See Intersections posts on Bolaño from 2007 here and from 2009 here). We're building a weekly newspaper, primarily in Spanish, partly in spirit of the Infrarrealists, but sort-of-actually-really-not-all.

("I haven't even read 2666, and that's so infrarrealista!")

Our newsroom is roaming between the gallery space and various points in the city, and so far always jussied up with the proper editorial bottles and snacks. The first issue of EC drops this Saturday, Sept. 24, and we haven't quite yet figured out how we're going to get it into people's hands. But it's definitely coming. Each issue will feature a beautiful full-color visual piece as a centerfold, and will also come with a link to a special audio track from one of our many beat-oriented comrades and collaborators.

We're all super excited, super nervous, and super busy (everyone on the small team has regular gigs or is juggling various other projects). So let's report it out, be nosy, read, not read, burn books, have a dance party, start a reality TV propaganda show, I dunno!

Update soon.

* NOTE: We are accepting pitches for your Highly Newsworthy stories, photography, cartoons, comics, info-graphics or maps, anything! Write us at prensaestrellacercana at gmail. Or to advertise in our pages, to reach our very classy would-be readers, please write publicidadestrellacercana at gmail.

** ABOVE: A Polaroid shot I've been holding onto for years. West Temple Street, Los Angeles, Calif., circa 2004. It lasted only a day, if not hours.

Till the world ends

No one ever said Salem wasn't pretentious. This is their screwed-down take on the Britney Spears hit, dragging the Apocalypse home one more time.

Salem dispenses with the over-produced dancers and the studded shoulderpads and sensibly employs footage of what appear to be U.S. combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to illustrate their themes. Yay. 

Noy voy a trabajar, Part 2

 

This is "Feriado Nacional" by the Mexico-Argentina favorites Kumbia Queers (who first popped up in here in mid-'07). It's another genre-bending track about the glories, or necessity, of not working.

True role models, as far as I'm concerned. I know that headache. Are we need of an a la chingada with it all, pan-Latino-style work revolt? Play it!

* Previously, "No voy a trabajar."

La Plaza: Peace protests offered window on Mexicans abroad

** Originally published at La Plaza:

When large demonstrations in Mexico calling for an end to the drug war grew last spring, communities of citizens abroad perked up and took notice.

Chatter began popping up on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Virtual groups formed. Mexicans living abroad united around a feeling of desperation over a climbing death toll and reacted to a growing sense among Mexicans at home that the government was losing control of the situation.

By May 8, when poet Javier Sicilia led tens of thousands of demonstrators on a march to the historic heart of Mexico City, smaller demonstrations were also held in cities all over the world, including Barcelona, Spain; Buenos Aires; Madrid; Montreal, Canada; Frankfurt, Germany; and in Paris with the Eiffel Tower looming in the distance.

The demonstrations not only showed that many Mexicans abroad were up-to-date with developments back home, they also offered a window into the large numbers of Mexicans making lives in other countries besides the traditional migration magnet of the United States.

Due largely to its historical migration relationship with the United States, Mexico is identified as the leading exporter of migrants worldwide according to the website Peoplemov.in, which uses open data sources to tabulate bilateral migration patterns. The World Bank also places Mexico as the highest source of human emigration on the planet (see the bank's data chart titled Bilateral migration matrix). The bank says 11.5 million Mexicans lived abroad as of November 2010, with 10.3 million of them in the United States.

By comparison, 2.2 million Americans live outside their country, with 452,182 of those U.S. citizens living in Mexico, the World Bank says. 

There are significant groups of Mexican citizens in Canada, Spain and France, all countries that saw protests on May 8. Perhaps the most significant protest against Mexico's drug war occurred in Berlin, where a Facebook group appeared early on using the movement's now-ubiquitous "No Mas Sangre," or "No More Blood" logo.

** Continue reading at La Plaza.

No voy a trabajar

By los Bermudas, veracruzanos, their international cumbia-ska-hiphop hit. Remember, in the end, it's all about the Dance. And not working. * Thanks, Pedrin.

Eyaculacion Post Mortem

This is Eyaculacion Post Mortem, from Barcelona, on Friday night at Club Atlantico in downtown Mexico DF. Like death-punk? They're synthy and hardcore. Live, one of the best shows of any kind I've been to in a long while.

People were dressed in their darky punk best. I was busy in the slam. Everyone's sweat. Bodies. "Gente guapa aqui en México," said a voice from behind the masks.

Here's an FB photo set from the show. Here's the band's blog with a report from a stop at the Airliner in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles. Sick.

Hipstertitlán ... o chakahipsters?

Here's part one the episode from June of the Canal 22 program Esquizofrenia on hipsters in Mexico City, with a exploration of the Condesa vortex then a graceful and smart detour to reggaetonero-land. I am interviewed as a periodista cultural along with a few other expert commentators.

Also appearing in part two and three. Fascinating, and great television!

I had no idea there was such a thing as "reggaetoneros fresas." For our part, we had started calling them chakahipsters. You know who I'm talking about. Have we really come full circle?

American guns

A highly recommended read: "An American Gun in Mexico," Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2011. The pieces demonstrates the extraordinarily thin line that exists between gun smugglers, gun dealers, and federal gun agents, in the war in Mexico that has left an estimated 40,000 dead. More this week at La Plaza.

India's first gay prince

"In the last decade, Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil got married, got divorced, came out of the closet, and talked to Oprah Winfrey -- and now, he's spreading awareness about a spreading HIV crisis in India."

At The Daily Beast via Yahoo! News. And here's a video of an interview at BBC, where in Brighton, his highness goes by "Manny."

Ashland Mines in U+U *

My brodderh Total Freedom, the king of casual, is wearing a one-of-a-kind altered overall by Uriel Urbán, aka U+U. Ash is wearing the piece as a jacket. We're on a street in Los Feliz, central Los Angeles, early May 2011. 

The piece is from Uriel's first collection, shot by César Arellano a year ago. Check the look-book they shot at the Teatro Opera here. Ashland mixed the runway soundtrack for U.'s second collection, which was presented in late March as part of International Designers Mexico. Watch highlights here.

If you wanna, get the original runway mix below, a gift from Intersections.

U+U RUNWAY __ TF mix

Below, our homie Ellory, out of New Orleans, wearing the overall through the legs. We're in the studio in Centro in late April, during Ellory's first stop over in D.F., via La Habana, on his way to Monterrey ...

A New York diary, Part 2

I'm just gonna to keep it real up-front right here.

During Part 1, Tuesday night, I had a nice dinner in the West Village with a friend, nice little Italian place, quintessentially New York, four cheeses. Later, in the dead of night, my stomach rumbled me awake. I got up. I then proceeded to puke up buckets and buckets of purple cheese sludge.

It was really disgusting. Came without warning, unprompted by alcohol or anything else. Just a violent expulsion. At a loss once more. Something in this city is disagreeing with me, I thought. Then Thursday happened ...

'Hysteria and mass emotion'

Above, the trailer for the 1974 film "Earthquake," co-written by Mario Puzo and starring Charlton Heston, depicting a mega-quake destroying Los Angeles.

Buildings crumble like mud and bread, people fall dramatically to their deaths from exposed rubble, stuff falls on people and crushes them, looters get shot. I remember seeing this film when I was kid. It was terrifying back then. Right now, would I laugh watching it or go check to see if we have a fresh earthquake kit?

And now a nuclear threat. A real one. Reassessment of the nuclear power plants along the California coast line: San Onofre, Diablo Canyon. Are they ready?

The news in the United States is intensely upsetting right now. It feels like it's from another world. But no, it's here, the world we've created. Watch this Russia Today report from what appears to be West Los Angeles. Correspondent Ramon Galindo, emphasizing the words "extra precaution" over and over, asks a regular citizen named Aaron Gonzalez how he's preparing for the coming nuclear apocalypse:

Gonzalez: "I've been following several subscribers on YouTube that broke the news early, so I was able to get to Whole Foods and beat the crowd and I was able to get a hold of several bottles of the potassium iodine pills so I can distribute to my family and friends."

Galindo: "Besides the pills, have you heard of any other people taking extra precautions to prepare for a possible radioactive cloud coming this way?"

Gonzalez: "I've heard of people saran-wrapping their doors and windows, loading up on rice and grains, storing water."

Well, horray.

Then this: A Berkeley-educated geologist who claims he can predict earthquakes and says we should expect one this weekend. Jim Berkland (bio here) accurately predicted, to the day, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area. He told Fox News -- where the threshold of speculative wackiness is usually very high -- that he predicts a large earthquake on the U.S. Pacific coast this Saturday, March 19. Watch here.

Berkland's evidence: schools of fish washing up dead (happened in Redondo Beach three days before the Japanese quake, and on the day in Acapulco, only the Mexican fishies were alive), animals fleeing their homes, high tides, and the spring equinox, arriving on Sunday, March 20.

When the anchor thanks Berkland for appearing on air, Berkland replies: "My pleasure, I hope."

Masumi, worldwide

Above, a shot of an American Apparel billboard at Sunset and Alvarado in Echo Park, Los Angeles, featuring Masumi Rioja, a native and resident of Mexico City.

Masumi has a strange effect on people. I know; I've seen it in action. Hang out a little and you'll wind up dazed, invigorated, shaken up. The nature of chemistry, I guess.

I have this suspicion that recent American Apparel window displays have also been inspired by Masumi. Mannequins I've seen in L.A. and D.F. have been fixed with long black locks and lips colored deep red. Precisely Masumi's everyday look.

Have you noticed? The self-proclaimed Xochimilca strikes.

* Previously, "Romina Aranzola in Playboy," "It's Tokyo."

It's been too long, Los Angeles

Forgive me for indulging in a few well-worn cliches about Los Angeles; the planet's mood is certainly apocalyptic enough this week as it is. A meltdown is in progress in Japan. So driving around this city again didn't help ease the sensation that the world is snapping and crumbling around us.

Los Angeles is unsettling by its nature.

I used to laugh at the over-use of this cliche because true L.A. sophisticates know that L.A. is "more complex" or "more normal" than outsiders insist on imagining. But then I remembered, in fact, I always felt a little like this when I lived in L.A., unsettled, scrambled. The amount of time spent alone in a vehicle is really remarkable and completely alters a person's relationship to the city, its landscape, its other citizens. You're driving a deadly weapon. Depth perception becomes fuzzy.

I snapped this photo Sunday while swinging under the 110 to reach the 101, after an afternoon visiting a friend in Venice, for a quick beer at a metal fest at the Echo, before the reading in Lincoln Heights, before dinner back in Pasadena. Pasadena's chiseled streets got me lost for the first time in L.A. in years. It was frustrating.

Earlier, something about driving this freeway interchange seemed especially unfamiliar. Then I noticed. All the graffiti is gone.

"Oh yeah, they buffed that."

No Grupo: Art provocateurs in 70s, 80s Mexico

* Above, No Grupo, Mexico City, c. 1980. Don't they look familiar?

No Grupo, pictured above, formed in Mexico City in 1977 and were active until 1983. They did conceptual collaborative art actions, but preferred not to be called a collective. They arrived uninvited to the Paris Biennial in the form of photographic face masks, they interviewed elder artists then harpooned their work in video or performance pieces, they did mail and paper art, they "patented" the act of appreciating the taco.

An exhibit on No-Grupo is up for only days more at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Chapultepec Park in Mexico City. It opened in October last year and closes on March 13. I finally caught it recently. It's an exciting show because you can make an immediate parallel to the work of a similar group doing similar work at the time in Los Angeles, Asco.

No-Grupo consisted of four core artists, like Asco, three men and one woman, also like Asco, and collaborated with several transient members, again like Asco. Melquiades Herrera, Alfredo Núñez, Rubén Valencia, and Maris Bustamante (who led the taco-patenting project) made conceptual gestures that played off popular, "low-brow" culture in Mexico City. They rejected dominant norms in a stratified state-dependent art-world of the day in performances in galleries and museums. They had fun.

In Mexico, more deaths than we can imagine

The men lying under arrest in the photograph above are not dead, but, who knows, by now they could be. It's been three days since this post from Ciudad Juarez by journalist Diego Osorno has been published. In Juarez today, three days is plenty of time to possibly get killed.

Juarez is a government-sustained human rights disaster, a 21st Century-style slow-burn multi-actor city-cide. Don't get the daily carnage tally by Molly Molloy at Frontera List? It tests the stomach. Juarez is drowning in death. But Juarez is just the tip of it all.

Read this piece in Spanish by Froylan Enciso in a recent issue of Gatopardo. Up in a town in the Sierra Madre, up from Mazatlán, a drug-trade-related ambush during Christmas 2009 leaves at least 40 people dead, maybe up to 100, Enciso writes during a visit home.

The incident never makes it into the press. It didn't happen. I checked the federal government database on homicides this morning. For Mazatlán, only 97 homicides are reported in 2009. That doesn't sound right ...

They tell us lately "at least" 35,000 have been killed in Mexico's drug-trade violence since the governments ignited it on themselves in 2006. That can't be accurate. Just ask someone who knows better, ask Metinides. As Enciso illustrates, so many dead are not reported, so many kidnapped are never returned. We'll never know.

The "drug war" is a fiction. The violence it is inflicting on the people of Mexico is very real. It is crushing the country. I don't know about you, but I've been tired of it. Yet there's still no end in sight.

Violence stops by decriminalizing and demilitarizing the binational industry that pumps drugs into the United States. But don't expect Obama or Calderon to come to that conclusion in the blah-blah at the White House this week.

Man, then who'd get to keep all the money?

* Photo via Gatopardo.com

Tepache in Southern California *

This is imported tepache, a natural drink made from fermented pineapple. I spotted this bottle last week while on a beer run at the liquor store on Sunset and Alvarado in Echo Park, Los Angeles. Could be nasty but could be good, I thought.

Tepache is sold all over D.F. from carts on the streets (usually in plastic baggies) or at many taco or quesadilla stands. It's refreshing, tart, cool, and is fermented so well in some cases, as in Oaxaca, it sometimes acquires an alcohol content. Beer is added sometimes.

This version of tepache is made by a company named Frumex, which calls it "pineapple cider." It's the first I've seen this traditional drink from central Mexico in bottled form or in the United States. Popped it open and took a swig. Besides being carbonated, the Frumex product is 'authentic' and damn good, in the quality ginger or root beer category of good.

So later on, back out in Riverside 50 miles east from L.A. in Southern California's suburban country, I saw the bottled tepache again at a Mexican supermarket. Bought two bottles this time, one for me and one to share with my hosts.

More on tepache here, from Rachel Laudan. A mouth-watering recipe with photos is there, by Pati's Mexican Table.

(Now, knowing how these things work, let me know when you spot some bottled tepache at your neighborhood Trader Joe's. Only a matter of time, watch.)

* Edited.

In memory of Cesar Arellano

Cesar Arellano, the original street-fashion-party photoblogger in Mexico City, has died. Cesar was a crucial founding component of the scene. He was hard-working, generous, and supported emerging talents and faces on his website, Diario de Fiestas.

There's a lot of sadness and shock in the community in D.F. right now. The scene has lost its most respected and committed indie chronicler. The loss is enormous.

Last year Cesar redesigned and upgraded his site. It had started out three years earlier on the blogspot platform and immediately made an impact on the fashion community in Mexico, how it saw itself, and how it read in other parts of the world.

To honor Cesar's life and work, I'm re-publishing below the section of a chapter in the book where he is interviewed. Cesar will be missed.

The trip

It's always such a strange trip returning to the United States. Even to some place like California, where most people are aware of Mexico and attuned to its beat, and a good many are part Mexican themselves or culturally Mesoamerican in some fashion. It's still not the same.

Mexico is an engulfing maelstrom, a non-stop party, the journey down the cave. The U.S.A. is this orderly appointment on freeways, where everything is watched, guarded, measured, and mediated. The one true religion is buying things. The crucial point, of course, the question, is where the two merge successfully or not, and how that happens.

Each time I come home to the border, I'm happy, but I am also almost immediately freaked out. I stand in line with the transnational workforce, come near the customs agents, take a deep breath, and tell myself, 'OK, get ready, this is going to be weird ...'

* Above, sunset over San Ysidro and the Tijuana river. 5 Feb. 2011.

Rihanna's corrido: 'Man Down'

I wanna see a hot video for this jam.

It's "Man Down" by Rihanna, with lyrics on screen above. The song is essentially a corrido telling the story of a woman confessing to just shooting a man to death and needing to escape. It's an homage to Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff," and almost as good as a song, I think. "Man Down" is co-written by Rock City and Shontelle, songwriters who are also from the Caribe.

As a native of Barbados, Rihanna inhabits her vocal Caribbeanness in the song so well. When she inches up an octave in the verse, it displays the wonderful and sometimes under-appreciated range and quality of her voice. Leaves you wanting more of it.

The "Sak Pasé" at the beginning is a Haitian Creole "what's up" collolquialism, and one that gained emotional meaning after the January 2010 earthquake. "Man Down" is off Rihanna's November 2010 release "Loud."

Cut cranium

Una obra que sobresale casi al final del recorrido de la expo de Jose Clemente Orozco, en San Ildefonso. "Craneo recortado," proxilina en masonite. La obra tiene como fecha 1947, dos años antes de la muerte de Orozco. Pertence al Instituto Cultural Cabañas en Guadalajara.

Mi reporte.

An outstanding painting near the end of the Jose Clemente Orozco exhibit at San Ildefonso. "Cut Cranium," proxylin on masonite. The painting's date is 1947, two years before Orozco's death. It belongs to the Instituto Cultural Cabañas in Guadalajara.

My report in link above.

Cowboy crews: This is what the kids are doing now

We don't know how or when it started, and wouldn't know what to properly call it. All we have to work off right now is this video recently commented by friend Anahi. Potentially, these are "cowboy crews" at Salinas High School on the Pacific slopes of California's San Joaquin Valley.

That's where generations of migrants from Mexico have traveled to pump out the crops that help make up the breadbasket of the United States. That's what my dad did. Migrants pick your fruit but also have kids. Kids go to high school. And make culture.

Here, they're taking banda music from Mexico and the Mexican diaspora in the U.S. and applying a dance style to it that involves the hopping and spinning of duranguense (previously explored in Intersections here) but with new acrobatic tricks. Mainly, flying into the air and to the ground and landing on your ass, then picking up the hopping right from there. The boys also do this break-dance-rooted diving move.

It looks competitive.

Oh not to worry. This kind of hyper-physicality is totally Mexi. Remember the "dos borrachos" dance clip that went viral a couple years ago? Realness.

But these cowboy crews? Are they big, big? Do they have them in L.A.? In other U.S. cities that are Mexicanizing? Atlanta? Salt Lake City? On Long Island? How are they socially organized? If you're reading this and in a cowboy crew, let us know what's up!

One of the best in blogs in L.A., Chimatli, caught duranguense early on. Here's the blog's dance category. Great stuff. Here, I've looked at tektonic arriving in Mexico City (but since kinda gone?), the cholo-cumbia-chuntaro current in the North, the mosh-pits of Ecatepec, and the (guarded) sonidero scene in and around Tepito.