Intersections

Negotiating saints

What do you think about when you are taking off from Earth in an airplane? Gods, spirits, saints, rainbows? The official caption above, via the Big Picture and its 2010 series, is: "An airplane passes in front of a rainbow above the Mediterranean sea in Nice, southeastern France on Aug. 5, 2010."

Turning 30 on the border *

I'm breaking a rule about posting too many photos with me in them, but who cares, I'm 30 today! They tell me 30 is when you get to say, 'I can do whatever I want,' and it finally becomes true.

This is me at the Monte de los Olivos cemetery in Tijuana this morning. Came with my mom and cousin Alan to visit our muertos on my arrival from Mexico City. That's the imposing Cerro Colorado in the background. The wind is strong, the hot sun. Many memories here, bitter and yet also sweet.

Tijuana is as clean, modern, and orderly as ever. We had breakfast at La Espadaña -- fast becoming a custom for us when I come home on early morning flights -- and then I crossed the border on foot. The heart always quickens as I stand in line; obese people, people whose skin has seen too much sun-and-meth cocktail, ancient tattoos, drawling English, AMERICA!!

The customs agent was kind of enough to say, "Happy birthday!" after scanning my passport. It was the only time, I thought, that the border-crossing experience has made me smile genuinely.

More photos from Monte de los Olivos are here, here, and here.

It's very warm up here/down here. I've slept all afternoon and I want more of it. Have no plans tonight except family and a certain date with any icy local beer. I appreciate all the kind wishes. Thank you.

The Indian church at Tonantzintla

This is the church of Santa María Tonantzintla, Puebla, a supreme example of barroco novohispano, or what they also call indigenous baroque. The style is basically a fusion of colonial architecture with pre-Hispanic design principles, and the site most often associated with indigenous baroque is Santo Domingo, in Oaxaca.

I'd argue Santa María Tonantzintla is on another level.

Friends had described it beforehand as the "Indian church" or the "church built by Indians," and indeed, on first sight, it feels indigenous, uniquely not a totem to Catholic power. The facade of the Tonantzintla church -- Nahautl for "the place of our little mother" or "lugar de nuestra madrecita" -- looks like how we imagine the exteriors of pyramids looked, not just ruins of stone but brightly colored and textured with dense ornamentation.

The saints and angels that adorn the exterior and interior niches are formed, vaguely, in the manner of the old Aztec sculptures.

 

Here's a closer view of the facade, and here's about as close a shot I was able to get inside the nave, as the church was packed with parishioners for a special Mass of some sort on the Sunday we visited. Photos are not allowed inside Santa María Tonantzintla, a rule I suppose is meant to preserve the maximal barroco novohispano decorative work that covers just about every inch of wall-space in the interior. But here's the Google Images scan, and here's an amateur video. Don't the walls look alive, unreal?

The Puebla state government says construction began on Santa María Tonantzintla in the 16th Century, by indigenous artisans. I was able to find very little information on the church's history otherwise. Apparently the local community is fiercely protective of the site, declaring that it is autonomous from the diocese of Puebla.

We happened to visit during the festival de queso in the pueblo. Mmmmm. Every outdoor space, packed with food and smells and vendors. We picked up some nopal and cheese ice cream, and then headed over to Chipilo.

First encounter with an Olmec head

When they told me there was an Olmec head in the middle of the town plaza, I didn't quite process it right. OK, check, an Olmec head. Then, as we're strolling around at night, I see it.

And I feel my knees bend on their own a little. Yes, there is an Olmec head in the middle of the town plaza.

Instantly, I felt I needed to start dancing. No idea.

This is tiny Santiago Tuxtla, Veracruz (pop. 15,225), and they call my friend seen here in the rear the "Cobata head," the largest of 17 so far discovered or excavated in Mexico. These heads, whose purpose or use is still unknown, are precious remnants of the Olmec civilization, the first advanced culture in Mesoamerica, emerging as early as 1,500 years before Christ.

The Cobata head is unique because it's the only one found with its eyes closed. Here it is in daylight. More here, and more later.

Solstice, standing by

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.

Postopolis Report No. 3: 'Residues of general economy' *

* Above, Mexico City, the lake of fire, at night from the air, via Oscar Ruiz.

Before going into highlights from Friday, I wanted to point out another highlight from Day 3, the photography of Oscar Ruiz, introduced by Gabriella Gomez Mont. Ruiz informed us before starting that he's not a professional photographer and not a professional speaker, he just flies helicopters. Yet from the air, he captures breathtaking images of the astonishing scale of Mexico City. Ruiz presented them with warmth and clarity, if a bit grimly.

As the pilot discussed his aerial pictures of shanties that spring up "over night" and resort-style residential complexes butting up against slums, you could hear the wonder and slight indignation in his voice at the severe social stratification he sees in Mexico from the skies. The photos have been online for years, so Ruiz's pictures are among the first people see when they browse the Web for a window into D.F.

It was great to finally attach a name and face to the photos.

Day 4:

Friday at Postopolis drew upon the hip-hop filter of Mexico City once more, with Camilo Smith, at the invitation of Wayne Marshall, interviewing 2Phase, an OG D.F. rapper by way of Chicago, and rapper Lil T'Ko. They got down a little on the mic and talked about their trajectories. Domus, one of the Postopolis sponsors, has great photos on Facebook.

In the evening, I introduced Cuauhtémoc Medina and Mariana Botey of the curatorial collective -- "sect," they insist -- El Espectro Rojo, or The Red Specter. As we saw on Friday, the group's level of theoretical rigor is challenging, almost aggressive, which is what makes their work so sharp and intellectually seductive. They have given themselves a clear mission of pushing the limits of curatorial practice and challenging normalized ideas about how art and the art object relate to capitalist production.

From the introductory text to "Critical Fetishes: Resides of general economy," The Red Specter's current show at the CA2 Madrid (made possible, they write, by the group's "Commissariat of Public Enlightenment"):

Critical Fetishes seeks to overcome the abjectionist description of capitalism's crisis, and to expose the way in which artistic work invokes moments of anti-production, de-activates the myths of development and puts the art object into operation as an object of desire and subversion. In this sense, the show takes a position against the identification of dematerialization with de-fetishization, as the dominant critical operation, in favor of rescuing the power of contagion and dissemination of the contemporary art fetish-object.

Postopolis DF was The Red Specter's first public "apparition" in Mexico City. The "Critical Fetishes" show is slated to come to the Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico later this year. Some of the artists include Santiago Sierra, Miguel Calderon, Francis Alÿs, Teresa Margolles, Fran Ilich, and Vicente Razo. (More then.)

Now, here are a few highly recommended recaps of the week by fellow Postopolis bloggers: Regine Debatty of We Make Money Not Art on Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3, and Nicola Twilley's exhaustive and enlightening talk with Rachel Laudan on Mexico, maize, Maseca, and Wal-Mart.

Pull-quote:

And the third thing that happened, finally — this really took place in the seventies and eighties — is that the company now called Gruma (Grupa Maseca) discovered a way to take the wet, alkali-treated maize, grind it, dehydrate it, and put it into packets. You've seen those packets in the grocery stores, I'm sure. By the 1970s, five percent of the maize for tortillas in Mexico came from Maseca. By the 1990s, it was fifteen percent. Maseca now has plans — whether they'll pull it off, I don't know — to take over all the tortillerias in the country.

More there, worth the whole read.

** Update: If you enjoyed Carlos Alvarez Montero's presentation of his photo work from Day 2, he'll be presenting the full version of his short documentary "Our Lady of the Bronx" at Club Atlántico in Centro, tomorrow Wednesday. I'll be moderating a Q&A with Carlos and Ali Gadorki will be playing tracks. More info here.

The work: Still no sign of 'Diego the Boss'

Here's a recent post at La Plaza, the L.A. Times Latin America news blog, on the disappearance of one of the most powerful men in Mexico, Diego Fernandez de Ceballos. The former presidential candidate for the PAN went missing on Friday night on his ranch in Querétaro.

Five days later, pretty much the entire security and law enforcement apparatus of the center of the country has been mobilized to find him, but still no sign of the man they call Jefe Diego. Tracy Wilkinson updates the story today: "Fernandez de Cevallos was more feared than beloved, and if he was the victim of kidnapping, as the evidence suggests, the list of suspects is a long one."

Other recent posts I have up at La Plaza:

• On attacks against in journalists in Honduras.
• A critique on the obsession in the U.S. with Cinco de Mayo.
• From Haiti, on the question of where to place the displaced.
• A look at a report on the struggle for balance in Mexico's narco war.
• On UNAM canceling an exchange program with Arizona.
• On the rise of 'Chavez fatigue' in Venezuela.
• On Costa Rica's first female president.
• On a less smoggy Mexico City.
• On Tijuana's reawakening -- question-mark.
• On a controversial port plan in Colombia.
• Placing some mapable context over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
• Surprise! Mexico keeps a corporate-friendly tax structure.
• And, Brazil's Lula takes a win on nuclear talks with Iran.

As always, I appreciate the link-ups, the feedback, the tips, and the comments! Posting here at Intersections remains light while I finish final edits on the final draft of my book manuscript.

* Photo above, Diego Fernandez de Ceballos, by European Pressphoto, via LAT.

Black responses to the Arizona immigration law

* Above, new Americans, rallying for justice, by Irfan Khan, L.A. Times.

The signing of SB1070 in Arizona has sparked a wave of negative reaction across the United States and across the political spectrum, from Barack Obama on down. There are numerous calls for a boycott of the state, a pledge against the law for people of faith, and a statement from the Major League Baseball players association condemning SB1070.

Some high school seniors are now deciding against going to college in Arizona. One comment on the New York Times blog post on the topic struck me as particularly intelligent, and hinting at the root of African American disdain for SB1070.

Barbara, a Duke alumnus, writes:

When I was a student at Duke there were many male African-American students who felt like they were being profiled because of the relatively high rate of crime on campus, and the fact that a disproportionate amount of it was attributable to young black men in the community. In some cases students were held even after they proved they were students. It made their college experience a lot worse than if they gone elsewhere. It's a legitimate consideration.

It's not that I don't understand that border states face special challenges and find the lack of progress frustrating, or that I don't agree that Mexico has long shown lack of inclination to face its social problems because it has a safety valve next door -- I share those concerns. But there is simply no way to enforce this law without targeting Hispanics. I don't care if that was the intent or not, it is almost certainly going to be its practical effect.

Indeed, history runs in cycles, and the U.S. has seen far too many discriminatory and hateful laws or practices that have targeted and abused African Americans for generations. Yes, we know that African American anxiety about Latino immigration to the U.S. exists, and exists widely. But Arizona's new law burns at the boundaries of our notions of justice and fair treatment under the law, which assaults any reasonable person's sense of decency -- regardless of color.

This is why so many prominent black Americans and black organizations are standing up against SB1070. At the top of the pack, for pure inspiration, is Chuck D, the former frontman of Public Enemy, who released a special track against the bill called "Tear Down That Wall." (Public Enemy, of course, has a track that has gone after politics in Arizona before.)

The Pyramid Project *

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."

The work: Oaxacan attack, Haitians, and 'Zoot Suit'

* Above, actors doing it up in the Mexico production of 'Zoot Suit.'

Perdiocally I'll be posting some of my recent work at La Plaza, the Latin American news blog at the L.A. Times. Just now, "Zoot Suit" premieres in Mexico City, the first time the landmark Chicano musical play is mounted in Mexico -- and the first time it is presented in Spanish. Very exciting news.

Here, a report on a breaking news item -- 2 people, a Mexican woman and a Finnish man, are killed in an ambush attack on a humanitarian caravan in a disputed region of Oaxaca. Here, an update on the movement of Haitians to Mexico. Here, a look at a new Purepecha urban settlement discovery in Michoacan.

Also, Bolivian president Evo Morales suggests chicken causes baldness and homosexuality, and Mexico City archbishop Norberto Rivera is named in a sexual abuse suit in federal court in Los Angeles.

L.A. Times Mexico City bureau chief Tracy Wilkinson posts about Mexico protesting the Arizona immigration law, Lorena Ochoa quitting golf, the FBI calling Salvadoran gang members terrorists, and Mexico issuing a travel advisory on Arizona.

* More soon.

Jodorowsky's Sunday comics

Above, a little girl asks, "Dad, What is liberty?" The father, a big man in orange, responds: "It is knowing oneself and acting in accordance with what one is." The artist is Alejandro Jodorowsky. He drew it for publication for January 14, 1968, in the Mexico City newspaper El Heraldo.

Via Fimoculous, via Technoccult, via Arthur magazine founder Jay Babcock, here's a blog that posted Jodorowsky's Sunday newspaper comics from the late 1960s. I'm eager to examine each one.

The maestro's inclination toward Zen is evident in the last posted comic, in which the speaker, driving through a heavy rain, completes the strip: "Do not allow fear to hold you back; always finish what you start."

Check out Babcock's interview with Jodoroswky here. "Energy is coming because I will die very soon," the maestro says in response to a question about how he gets so much done. "I am old. I have so many things to do, so every day I get quicker, in order to do them! I don’t want to die without doing everything I wanted to do."

* Previously, "Defend when attacked: Zen meets Mexico, D.F."

Wrath of the three-day weekend *

One of the great traditions in Mexico City -- "great" like Tax Day, "great" like Black Friday -- is running out of town for puente, a three-day weekend. Ingloriously, desperately, chilangos choke the highway exits from the basin on Friday or Saturday to crowd against one another -- just like in the city -- at the most predictable of getaway destinations: Cuernavaca, Valle de Bravo, Acapulco.

Consequently, going anywhere for puente (and no one seems to ever care what the specific holiday is) can be a hectic ordeal. But we went anyway, to Tepoztlán, to test our three-day weekend survival skills.

Reading: John Ross and his 'El Monstruo'

* 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.

Return to Monte Albán

Above, visitors to the Monte Albán archaeological site near Oaxaca city, January 30. The site is breath-taking -- rising 1,300 feet from the floor of the surrounding valleys, a mountaintop shaved away by the Zapotecs who built upon it a grand, complex city that shone for one thousand years. The last time I was here was in 2002, when I took my ritual post-university solo backpacking trip through southern Mexico.

On the afternoon I visited, I watched as a rainstorm approached the mountain from the east. I stood on the highest platform on the site's northern cluster and watched the rain roll menacingly in our direction, blanketing and shrouding the homes and buildings far below, until we were inside the cloud itself.

Soaking, pounding rain. A wall of rain. People rushed to huddle inside the Monte Albán museum, shivering. I hung back. I stood alone on the platforms and arid fields, drenched, taking my time to descend to any van that was heading back down the hill.

Rain is noisy but it also carries a curious kind of silence. It's just you and the elements. It was totally worth it.

* Previously, "Tattoo shops in Oaxaca," "Beef consomé," "Tlaloc ate babies," "Rain on Easter Sunday," "An über-hip version of the rain god?"

Imagining divine androgyny

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.

Pedro Friedeberg, master surrealist

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

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

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

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

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

Check out his work here.

In Celebration of hybridity and rebirth

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

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

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

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

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

Gang Gang Dance in Mexico, bellybutton of the moon

* Above, Lizzi Bougatsos.

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

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

A mind-blasting experience.

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

Tlaloc ate babies

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

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

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

An Aztec San Judas Tadeo

The fireworks boomed across the sky starting late Tuesday night. At midnight, it was October 28, and thus the feast day for San Judas Tadeo. He is the patron of lost causes -- an office which makes him hugely popular among certain segments of the population in Mexico City: cholos, ambulantes, addicts, barrio people and the people who love them. All day, more fireworks.

The above photo, taken Wednesday afternoon, is by Livia Radwanski, who also documents the sonidero subculture in D.F. The man pictured proudly carried his San Judas statue in an Aztec-like headdress and a sequined robe. Behind him, neo-indigenist groups danced and drummed all afternoon in the middle of Paseo de la Reforma.

Scorpio is here

* Above, acrylic and aerosol on canvas, by Sergio Hernandez.

Scorpio is here, and we all know what that means -- besides ferociously mythical horses. It's birthday time! On November 4, I turn 29. Yes, it's been another intense year. Right now, "it looks like you are in this serious work, reflective, looking to the future phase of your life," a friendly amateur astrologist just informed me.

I'd say that's about right. I'm writing, working, waiting, looking ahead. I've survived all the mid-twenties death-traps and I'm ready to relish in the sweet stings of late-youth. At least I know Fergie is by my side. And 15th Century Middle Eastern anatomical drawings. And Dolly Parton.

Above, modeling a one-of-a-kind hand-studded San Judas Tadeo sweatshirt by designer Uriel Urbán, available in Los Angeles exclusively at New High (M)art. Remember, October 28 is the day for San Juditas. This year, the saint has certainly earned it.

Mexico City is once again wintry and wet around these death-festive dates. The cool reminds that the month of Scorpio is about remaining calm and enjoying the ride. You handle yours, I'll handle mine.

* Link-in image, colored pencil on canary paper, by Kathryn Garcia.

The deadly shooting on the Mexico City metro *

If you can muster watching it, here is security camera footage of the Friday afternoon shooting on metro Balderas, on the north-bound platform of Line 3. At 5:14 p.m., a Metro police officer approaches a man who is scrawling graffiti on a wall. The man pulls out a gun and shoots the officer, killing him. The rush-hour crowd scatters instantly. In the confusion, a second man attempts to subdue the shooter, but he stumbles several times, and the assailant eventually fires into his head, ending his life.

Luis Felipe Hernández (who invoked God before starting to shoot at people) moves into the stalled train, still pointing his .38-caliber revolver at others. Commuters are seen being evacuated out of the station, in single-file against the walls. Minutes later, a plain-clothes police officer approaches the train, his weapon drawn. Shots are fired. Hernández is tackled.

Esteban Cervantes Barrera, the unarmed man who tried to stop Hernandez, had 5 children, Televisa said. He's being hailed as a hero, and the government says it will adopt his survivors. The officer killed has been identified as Víctor Miranda Martínez. He is being honored today at the Monumento de la Revolución. Now metal detectors will be used inside the system and 1,600 new officers are being added to the platforms. They will be armed.

There is a culture of violence in Mexico, definitely, but a crazy person randomly shooting people is not the sort of thing that happens here. To put it bluntly, that's an American thing. But something is shifting. A God-invoking Bolivian hijacked an Aeromexico flight last Wednesday between Cancun and Mexico City.

It's as though the collective madness of right now has been turned up a few notches. In the U.S., the extreme narco violence in Mexico is often (and unfairly) characterized as a creeping contagion "spilling" into the North. There's a flip-side to that. The U.S.-style violence of insanity, chaos, and senselessness is also being exported South. Along with everything else.

Yesterday when I first heard the news -- in a frantic call from a friend -- I was in a meeting near metro Patriotismo. I rushed out to try to make it to the scene. The metro was operating as normal. Then my train stalled in the tunnel just before the transfer point Centro Medico -- for a half-hour. Crowded shoulder to shoulder, in the hot tunnel, moisture on our skin from the rain, we stood ... and stood ... patient. When our train was finally cleared to the platform, a wall of people attempted to push into our car, while a few of us inside tried pushing out.

I'm not above trendy American-style outbursts, so I hollered, "Dejen salir!" and fought my way through, somehow losing a set of earphones in the crush. People were crammed on the platform, wall to lip; every transfer point with Line 3 had to have been screwed. I struggled to make it to the surface, deciding to just walk -- yet hundreds, maybe thousands of people were coming down into the station nonetheless.

They had to get home.

The craziness of U.S. violence may be arriving in Mexico, but the crazy American-style reactions to it don't appear to be.

We use the metro in Mexico City because it costs 2 pesos, moves quickly, gets you where you need to be, and is safe. If the city's 4.5-million daily metro riders can handle a typical Friday rush-hour commute, no armed lunatic thrown occasionally into the mix will stand in our way between Point A and Point B.

Control your magic, Part 2

Above, converging in the middle of Mexico City with a French-Iranian curator and art worker from New York, and a Zacatecas pocho artist and "wanderer" from San Francisco, swapping secrets on crocheting and crystals, mythologies both ancient and contemporary, and on how similar Mexico City is to Tehran -- as anyone who's been to both places always concurs.

More here, here, here, and here. You get the sense this sort of thing happens all the time, in 2009 in the bellybutton of the moon, guided by ideal convergences. The idea struck me as I walked the other night in the rain on a strip of Calzada de Tlalpan dotted with thumping cantinas, transgendered sex workers, and the local Chinese.

* Previously, "Control your magic."

Spreading Islam on the Mexico City metro

Here's a video that shows a Mexican Muslim named Mustafa demonstrating an example of dawa in Mexico -- an advertisement for Islam.com.mx on the metro. More videos of people preaching Islam in Mexico are here and here, in a taxi cab.

* Previously, "Indigenous people converting to Islam in Mexico."

Control your magic

* Above, one of the Seven Muses of Mexico City, and ONDA FUZOO, on a casual mid-week afternoon in downtown D.F.

There is no better way to put this than in the most abstract terms: It is another season of change, challenges, growth, development, the tearing down of walls and the breaking through of membranes. Everywhere I look, stuff is crumbling apart then coming back together in another form. This is not often pretty, very often difficult, but most certainly necessary. Love provokes and provides.

That's life in upside-down Mexico City in the unusually dry mid-late summer of 2009. The city heaves. So we must be brave.

Just like, you might say, the stance of the two worthy football rivals who took to the field at the grand Estadio Azteca on Wednesday. Mexico emerged triumphant in the end, restoring "order to its universe." But greater battles loom on the horizon.

The same day, a measure of justice is achieved for the ghosts of Acteal. But again, it's only the beginning. Today August 13 is the 488th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan. The neo-indigenistas are gathering at the Zócalo as dusk falls, drumming and howling to the moon, in honor of our mangled roots. Imbalances, as a friend said wisely on Sunday, create new balances.

NOTE: This blog stays dark for at least another quincena. I'm writing, fighting with writing, starting new projects, closing others. My only advice to you is: Control your magic. Hunt and gather. And, as I said before ...

Trails of blood in the Mormon killing case?

* Above, the funeral in Colonia LeBarón, via Zocalo de Saltillo.

In Mexico, citizens who organize to fight their communities' culture of fear and corruption become targets themselves. In Mexico, criminals express their power through killing. Religious minority communities are not exempt in such a system. From Elisabeth Malkin in Chihuahua:

When a 16-year-old boy was kidnapped from this fundamentalist Mormon community in early May, ransom was set at $1 million. The town chose not to pay. Instead, led by the boy's older brother, members of the community traveled to the state capital, Chihuahua, to demand that the government catch the kidnappers. Nobody knows exactly why, but seven days later, the boy was freed.

Soon, from other towns scattered in the valleys that stretch under the purple-rimmed mountains of the Sierra Madre, farmers facing extortion and intimidation began pleading with the crusading brother, Benjamín LeBarón — a great-grandson of the Mormon community's founder — for help. He tried, forming a group to help towns put pressure on the authorities. And then he was dead.

As things stand now, the Benjamín LeBarón case cannot remain an isolated incident for very long. But, there's always a back story. Richard Grabman at The Mex Files excavates the curious and blood-ridden history of the LeBarón clan:

When Alma died in 1951, leadership in the community passed to his son, Joel. Joel left the Apostolic United Brethern to found his own church, the "Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times." At least some of the LeBarons, including second in command, Joel's younger brother Ervil, later moved to Baja California. Ervil moved to San Diego, California to start a second church.

And, then it gets very, very weird.

More there.

Morality and reason in Mexico's drug war

* Above, moral authorities: Felipe and Margarita, via La Jornada.

There is a tendency to see the bloody and surreal narco war in Mexico in stark black-and-whites, but just a scratching of the surface reveals infinite shades of gray, and degrees of complicity up and down the class scale. Are small-time users on both sides of the border good guys or bad guys? How about a cartel that has strict Christianist values but makes no hesistation in killing those who cross them? And what about all those narco-politicians who allegedly strike deals with traffickers in order to minimize violence and disorder in their states?

Consider also the dark labyrinth of moral corruption that permeates local media operations across the country. From Charles Bowden's engrossing narrative on the life of a journalist in the narco-controlled North:

"Corruption at the paper," he explains, "was subtle. The politicians would win over my boss with dinners and bags of money. The reporter on the beat would sometimes get pressure from the boss not to report certain things like the bad habits of politicians, the houses they own, the girlfriends. And it was understood that you never asked hard questions. The narcos also gave out money but I was always afraid of them. They own businesses and horses, buy ads, have parties with celebrities and you cover that, they would pay you to cover that, but you never mentioned their real business."

He sees his Mexico as genetically corrupt. A corrupt Aztec ruling class fused with the trash of Spain, the conquistadors. This thesis helps him face the reality around him.

"In Mexico," he says, "we operate in disguise. There is one face and under that is another mask. Nothing is up-front."

Read the whole thing here; it's worth it. The piece also dissects corruption and impunity in the oh-so-upright Mexican military.

Far as I'm concerned, one of the most disingenuous gestures I've seen so far in this eternal mess is the head of the Mexican state saying publicly that Mexican youth become "slaves" of the narco trade because, yes, "they don't believe in God, they don't know him."

Unreasoned, outrageous, and as a statement from an executive in a secular republic, deeply immoral.

Saint Jude's

For years, in my earliest memories, this church was the signpost of our hill, St. Jude's in Shelltown, its south-facing neon cross glowing in the night, visible from the 5 freeway.

Where do you live? By St. Jude's we'd say. No wonder.

An über-hip vision of the rain god?

There's been a welcome re-shuffling of the permanent collection at the MUNAL, a grand museum that like many in Mexico City has a breathtaking permanent collection but suffers from terrible museumography. The main temporary show right now is built on the weak premise of somehow filtering MUNAL's collection through the "lens" of Octavio Paz. This basically means moving around the artworks and stringing them together with strange and confusing quotations from Paz's writings.

The upside, room for fresh works!

The MUNAL is finally acknowledging thousands of years of Mexican history that preceded the collision with the Spanish by bringing in pre-Columbian artifacts to the spaces. One of these, seen above, stopped me in my tracks. It's a late Classic Tlaloc (for whom I've always had a soft spot) from the Veracruz region.

The Tlaloc is in remarkable condition. But take a close look. With his skinny frame, hunched and pensive pose, oversized eyewear, uh, uncommon fashion sense, and petulant demeanor, I couldn't help asking ...

Is this the most hipster-ish deity figure that Mesoamerica ever produced?

Gabriel Orozco takes on the desert

Above, a detail of a piece in Gabriel Orozco's solo show currently up at Kurimanzutto, shot by Deborah Bonello of MexicoReporter. Here's Deborah's post on the show, with a video interview with the artist, at La Plaza.

Orozco inserts ancient dried plant life from Mexico's harsh deserts into the white cube of the gallery, and rings the space with psychedelic geometrical drawings, some done beautifully in gold leaf. The desert object above is fitted with creepy glass eyes. Forgive me, but the whole thing feels like an homage to peyote.

Who is Gabriel Orozco? In the history of Mexican contemporary art, he holds a singular place, as his practice in the late 1980s and 90s impacted not only Mexican art but aesthetic trends on a global scale. From the catalog for "La era de la discrepancia/The Age of Discrepancy," edited by Olivier Debroise:

From 1987 to 1990, he began to formulate a dissident approach to art that drew upon numerous anti-art strategies, from Marcel Duchamp's read-mades to Joseph Beuys's concept of "expansion." Through his talleres de los viernes, or Friday workshop, Orozco had a notable influence on the artists who would later found Temistocles 44, marked by the irruption of philosophical theory into artistic practices. Orozco participated in several group shows in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but he maintained a low profile, since his proposals -- like abrading bricks during a walk through a vacant lot, leaving traces of red powder, or arranging abandoned oranges on the stands in an open air market, or inserting stones found while walking in his Tlalpan neighborhood into a metal fence -- did not really fit within the institutional structures of the time, mainly because they questioned the artistic support itself.

Orozco's show at Kurimanzutto is up until June 13. He is currently preparing a retrospective that debuts in December at New York's MOMA, then travels to Paris and London.