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Stop, stop, the New Yorkers will hear

Thursday, November 17, 2011

After moving to Los Angeles, I found myself woken up on Saturdays and Sundays by a woman out on the street repeatedly singing, with a faintly surreal rare-bird intonation, the phrase, “Tamales! Y champurado!” In Mexico City, I discovered the filling wonders of a breakfast of tamales and champurado. (We actually drank strawberry atole, but close enough.) Looking for a hit of el D.F. after returning to the States, I woke up on Sunday and rushed downstairs — I’d fallen asleep in all my clothes the night before, making this easy — only to hear the singing cease just as I reached the sidewalk. Desperately wandering, I eventually found her and her tamales y champurado. She’d parked herself on 8th between Normandie and Ardmore, where street-food sellers, their shopping carts converted into kitchens, their propane griddles fired up, ply any number of deliciosities. On that small stretch, at least, I can feel like I’m back in Mexico — and hey, the foodies haven’t discovered it yet!

While I lament the cold, the bouts of sleepiness, and the numbness of lower extremities endemic to the double- and triple-features I attend in L.A., but I wouldn’t have it any other way. The near-total lack of theatrical screenings of films not in current release fueled my engine of disappointment with Santa Barbara; numerous chances to watch movies from the nineties, eighties, seventies, sixties, and earlier on film, in a theater certainly motivated my increasingly frequent L.A. trips toward the end there. While the more specialized of these pictures haven’t had DVD releases, I even go to screenings of ones that have. Audiovisual issues aside, I prefer the theater because it has no play button, no pause button, and no fast-forward button. Anthony Lane put this clearly — how else could he have put it? — in his piece on, of all movies, Tower Heist:

There’s only one problem with home cinema: it doesn’t exist. The very phrase is an oxymoron. As you pause your film to answer the door or fetch a Coke, the experience ceases to be cinema. Even the act of choosing when to watch means you are no longer at the movies. Choice—preferably an exhaustive menu of it—pretty much defines our status as consumers, and has long been an unquestioned tenet of the capitalist feast, but in fact carte blanche is no way to run a cultural life (or any kind of life, for that matter), and one thing that has nourished the theatrical experience, from the Athens of Aeschylus to the multiplex, is the element of compulsion. Someone else decides when the show will start; we may decide whether to attend, but, once we take our seats, we join the ride and surrender our will. The same goes for the folks around us, whom we do not know, and whom we resemble only in our private desire to know more of what will unfold in public, on the stage or screen. We are strangers in communion, and, once that pact of the intimate and the populous is snapped, the charm is gone. Our revels now are ended.

It occurs to me that you could frame the arrival of Papaya King in Hollywood as one more lurch forward in the grand New-Yorkization of Los Angeles. While I have no idea if our town is actually undergoing such a metamorphosis, doesn’t it sound fascinating? I instinctively welcome certain elements of this process (Metro extension in particular) and hope others never come to pass (garbage piles, winter), but I don’t have a clear image of which elements of NYC cuisine to import. Hot dogs and juices seem as suitable as anything, especially when you slot them into the closest side street the main stretch of Hollywood Boulevard has, at night, to a dark alley. The bright “PAPAYAKING” sign might provide the only strong source of outdoor illumination.

They’ve done the Hollywood Papaya King up in amusement-park colors, all the better to evoke its bewildering array of fruit drinks (it occurs to me that I don’t know if they officially qualify as “juices,” or if there exists an such an official qualification) on offer. We ordered one cup of papaya drink, because you have to, and one of lemonade, because who doesn’t enjoy lemonade with their hot dogs? The dogs themselves, just on the small side but much more appealing for it, can potentially come loaded with chili, cheese, and such, but only two topping options struck me as realistic: sauerkraut (“kraut”) or onions (“NY onions,” which look and taste more like marmalade) — plus, naturellement, self-pumped mustard.

We ate and drank standing, leaning on their street-facing counter. “Seems New York-y,” I thought. I partook of a pile of curly fries while fighting a sneaking suspicion that they somehow “impurified” my hot dog experience. I wondered where Papaya King’s hot dogs, which we devoured in the minutes before the screening at the Egyptian of a documentary about Tokyo’s greatest sushi master, place in the eternal struggle between New York and Chicago junk foods. Then I heard a middle-aged woman air her bewilderment about why purists say you should never, ever put ketchup on your hot dog. “But I like ketchup!” the woman insisted. “Stop, stop,” I thought. “The New Yorkers will hear.”

The guy behind the counter kept asking his customers friendly questions in an effort, I think, to alleviate the strain of existing amid Papaya King’s aggressive color scheme all night long. I asked him how he was doing. “Living the dream!” he replied. I started to laugh, but then suddenly didn’t know whether to laugh. Was I supposed to get sad instead? But hey, he actually has a job; I can’t say the same. Which brings me to my point: I remember Papaya King being reasonably cheap.

The tendency of Mexico City businesses that sell similar things to geographically cluster with one another surprised me; I figured you’d never see that in L.A. Yet on the walk from Papaya King to the Egyptian, I felt bout after bout of mini-déjà vu vu. We passed almost a dozen shops with front windows populated entirely by mannequins dressed in whatever you call outfits that fall halfway between lingerie and Halloween costumes. So on Hollywood Boulevard, those businesses cluster. Whatever those businesses are.

Even now that having no income has finally forced me to spend most of my time at home, I still talk to more different people on the average L.A. day than I did in the average Santa Barbara week. Just a big-city thing, perhaps, but it keeps in rigorous practice the lessons about conversation I’ve learned, very slowly, over the past decade. Scott Adams blogged with admirable succinctness about more or less these same lessons last year:

How many times have you been in a restaurant and victimized by the loud guy at the next table dominating the conversation without the benefit of being entertaining? It seems somewhat common that people who are neither alien nor Asperger syndrome types have no conversation skills. Indeed, it appears that many so-called normal people don’t even understand the concept of a conversation.

A conversation, like dancing, has some rules, although I’ve never seen them stated anywhere. The objective of conversation is to entertain or inform the other person while not using up all of the talking time. A big part of how you entertain another person is by listening and giving your attention. Ideally, your own enjoyment from conversation comes from the other person doing his or her job of being interesting. If you are entertaining yourself at the other person’s expense, you’re doing it wrong.

You might think that everyone on earth understands what a conversation is and how to engage in one. My observation is that no more than a quarter of the population has that understanding. Prior to [taking a Dale Carnegie course] I believed that conversation was a process by which I could demonstrate my cleverness, complain about what was bugging me, and argue with people in order to teach them how dumb they were. To me, listening was the same thing as being bored.  I figured it was the other person’s responsibility to find some entertainment in the conversation. That wasn’t my job. Yes, I was that asshole. But I didn’t know it. The good news is that once I learned the rules of conversation, I was socially reborn.

I cut out a couple lines about Dale Carnegie there to save space, but rest assured that I’ve enjoyed reading his book since high school. Anybody know I can pick up an original, non-updated, non-P.C. edition straight from the thirties?

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Richard Yates: Young Hearts Crying

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

A friend who’s big in L.A. book culture once advised me that my literary habits, “bounded on one side by Harry Mathews and on the other by Rikki Ducornet,” might not allow me to connect with the broad reading public I’d like to. While I don’t wall myself off quite like that — I’m only now cracking Mathews, and I have yet to seriously explore Ducornet — my personal novelist pantheon does include types at least as far from the mainstream as Alexander Theroux, Kobo Abe, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint. I responded with the concealed weapon in the arsenal that is my literary life: Richard Yates. Linear! Realistic! Midcentury! Actively hostile to experimentation! Yet I can’t stop returning to his well.

After Revolutionary Road, The Easter Parade, both books of short stories, and now Young Hearts Crying, I hazard the guess that I’ll continue my slow but steady progress through the Yates oeuvre in search of more descriptions of elaborate self-deception, of bitterly semi-private shame, and of the humiliating word salads we spout when we teeter on the edge of the yawning gap between our real and our (long-, loudly, and tiresomely discussed) actual intentions. This strikes me as the core of his craft, especially when he writes them on the part of fellow members of America’s “Greatest” World War II generation who flail against unabating feelings of fraudulence and inadequacy. Every generation fights the same private battles, I suppose, but none of them have used the phrase “son of a bitch” so well (or so often).

Yates’ second-to-last novel and one even his fans don’t discuss much these days, Young Hearts Crying seems like a bit of an oddity, especially since what little people do write about it nevertheless sounds like great acclaim. It follows the development and consequences of an early marriage, right out of university, between Michael and Lucy Davenport. He an aspiring poet, she a millionaire heiress, their future looks bright until the compromises start piling up. Sensing potential emasculation by Lucy’s fortune, Michael insists upon working by day at a chain store trade journal to support the family while struggling to write his “real” work. Under these circumstances, the couple eventually finds themselves, plus a daughter, living in the misshapen cottage on a private estate way out in upstate New York where their marriage will dissolve.

Unlike Revolutionary Road, this novel doesn’t end with the troubled union it examines. Yates spends most of its chapters covering the next twenty-odd years of Michael and Lucy’s separate lives, and their behavior in this stretch bears one important resemblance to Frank and April Wheeler’s in the earlier novel: they long for “creative” lives, lives lived in “the arts,” lives they seem far too weak and unimaginative — and far too unaware of their weakness and lack of imagination — ever to construct. (“Well, if she’s not a painter, maybe she wasn’t a writer, either, or an actress, either,” a friend says late in the book to the academia-stranded Michael of Lucy’s many wan attempts at creativity, “and look, I know this may sound harsh, but there’s an awful lot of women running around trying things.”) Most of Yates’ protagonists I’ve read about so far suffer from just this condition, which gives Yates ample opportunity to write in luxurious detail that self-delusion I so celebrate.

If forced to pin down Yates’ main psychological theme, I’d call it the unbearable contrast between his characters’ dimly envisioned goals and the punishingly mundane problems that actually dominate their lives. In response, some of his characters turn to booze, some crack up, some fall into the arms of variously unsuitable partners, some lay complicated self-sabotage traps, some attempt at-home abortions — and some, like the former Davenports, run through combinations thereof. (Except no at-home abortions this time out.) Always balancing on the wall of cruelty, Yates dangles before the young Michael and Lucy several couples who appear to be living the artistic dream, only to release them into their own forms of mediocrity decades later. “I thought you were fucking enchanted,” the aged but still damagingly impulsive Michael laments to his former idol of painterly bohemianism, now brought similarly low by a workaday teaching gig.

Young Hearts Crying puts a new wrinkle in the Yates cloth with its direct gaze onto a particularly sad — and, in life, sadly common — tendency in its characters’ lives. Though Michael and Lucy and even several secondary players here might like to think of their struggles in grand artistic terms — to write a poem that captures the experience of a psychotic break, to truly embody the role of Blance DuBois, to atmospherically explore a woman’s consciousness in a novel — their actual struggles, for which Yates starkly accounts on the page, come mostly from the desperate search and attempt to retain one more reasonably suitable man or woman with whom to go to bed. Even when they attain the equanimity to do their “real” work, they find they’ve been chiseled to resigned rubble by all this fruitless romantic turbulence. That’s assuming they had the wherewithal to create anything lasting to begin with, which Yates leaves that very much in doubt.

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Diario de Los Angeles

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

[Might as well stick to the format for a while. Seems to work.]

I have friends here who insist that, despite the surface noise, not much in the way of culture really goes on in Los Angeles. While I suppose I should defer, to some extent, to their seniority in the city, I did fly back from Mexico City and go to an Antonioni double-bill that very night. Then came Terry Gilliam live with Brazil the next night. Then came Wim Wenders live with Wings of Desire and Faraway, So Close! Film culture is indisputably here; I’d say food culture is, too.

Does Wim Wenders live in L.A., at least part-time? I’ve heard people claim that he does, though I can’t find any evidence either way. Whether he does or not, he seemed oddly comfortable in Santa Monica. We ran into him and his entourage on a street corner before his show, and I felt the odd pleasure you feel when you see someone who, in real life, looks exactly like he does in media. He wore a black jacket with bright stripes and splotches of what looked like red and blue paint (or maybe paintlike thread patterns) on the sleeves. Rei Kawakubo? Yohji Yamamoto?

Los Angeles has brought regular double- and triple-bills into my life. Somehow, I’ve sat through the schlocky triple-bills — John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy”; Willard, Wild Beasts, Shakma — in greater comfort than the more “respectable” double-bills. At Wenders’ films, as often happens at these events, I simultaneously experienced great cinematic excitement and terribly distracting cold. Did the management shut off the heating for the lesser-known, lesser-regarded picture, or did nearly six hours of near-immobility just stop my blood from circulating?

Scouting out apartments before moving here, I found myself strangely captivated by the slightly older, slightly more run-down area of Koreatown around 7th and Normandie. This had in large part to do with a little shack standing all alone in the parking lot of one of those L-shaped shopping centers (Madelaine’s dad, who’s worked in mall architecture calls them “LaManchas,” after the company that threw them up so feverishly in the seventies) you see everywhere in town. Despite having the shape of a burger or taco joint from days gone by, it advertised “authentic Korean dumpling” in English. My command of Korean didn’t quite rise to the occasion of reading anything else on its sign, except that the place seemed to be called “Yu Ga Ne”.

After actually moving to Koreatown — 7th and Mariposa, to be precise — I so deeply understood the inevitability of eating at Yu Ga Ne that I somehow put it off for a couple of months. Part of this owed to the kind of frugality you only develop by having no income whatsoever, but that eventually broke down. I mean, if I won’t eat at a place with a black-and-white Xerox of its accolades from Los Angeles magazines “100 Cheap Eats” issue, where will I eat? Crossing the threshold, I discovered not the take-your-shite-and-get-out counter I expected, but a full-fledged “sit-down experience.” From a converted burger and/or taco stand? Fascinating.

Yelp reviews and word of mouth pointed to the combination of “king dumplings” and black bean noodles as a gateway. Intellectually, I knew that this would make enough of a meal for two, but, unable to stand the idea of only one king dumpling each, I asked for a full order of black bean noodles, a full order of dumplings, and a full order of “hot tofu.” Naturally, more food than we could put away promptly arrived, but the flavor situation turned out to be such that I very much wanted to cram it all into my unwilling stomach. In the comfort of Yu Ga Ne, after all, I could ease the pain by drinking all the cold corn tea I pleased.

Leaving, nevertheless, with a hearty box of leftovers in hand, I reflected upon the fact of our being the only non-Koreans in the (admittedly tiny) restaurant. This bodes well for language practice; given its proximity to my home and the rich flavors of its food, I’ll prioritize becoming a regular here. (As soon as I get money, that is; we effectively ate a lunch and a dinner for a double sawbuck, total, but still.) I find that two demographic profiles in an eatery signal well about its eating experience: when everyone’s the same nationality as the food, or when everyone’s a completely different nationality. The worst sign? When everyone’s the same nationality, but not the nationality of the food. That bring big trouble. Bad medicine.

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The Marketplace of Ideas: to come to terms in L.A.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

This week on The Marketplace of Ideas, I talk to Laurie Ochoa and Joe Donnelly, founding editors of the new Los Angeles literary journal Slake. The magazine, which has just released its third issue, combines fiction, poetry, essays, reportage, photography, and several different kinds of visual art into a regular exploration of Los Angeles from every angle — and an exploration of the rest of the world from a Los Angeles angle.

Given the recent relocation of Marketplace of Ideas World Headquarters to Los Angeles, what conversation could be more appropriate than one with the creators of such an engine of fresh explorations of the city? Topics directly related to the city — and thus, in some sense, directly related to human existence — include navigating the world in microcosm, living in a town that couldn’t care less whether you like it, feeling the drive of imagination toward the future rather than the past, realizing what your life really is, and approaching place through various types of art and journalism all at once.

Download the conversation on iTunes here or on the web site here.

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Diario de Ciudad de México X

Monday, November 14, 2011

The end of my first stay in Mexico City brought to mind what I’ve come to call the Momus Test:

When I visit a place, fantasies of living there start to tug at the edges of my imagination. How would I survive economically here? Which area would I pick to live in? How would I decorate my new apartment? How much rent would I have to pay? Would I ride a bike? How would I dress? Which cafes and clubs would I begin to haunt? Who would become my new friends?

Since this is a game of fantasy, it would be easy to imagineer oneself into some chintzy turreted mansion in a rich, flashy neighbourhood. Dreaming costs nothing, so why dream small, right? But fantasy doesn’t work like that, for me, anyway. The most evocative fantasy is one with only the thinnest membrane between itself and reality; it gets its power from being eminently possible. From being a plan. So actually, my imagination thrives on rather austere, impoverished scenarios. I like to project myself into rather stark, cheap, working class districts, and imagine some kind of free vie de boheme unfolding in them.

(Past Marketplace of Ideas guest) Momus wrote this post about whether he could live in Osaka. Now he lives in Osaka. I’ll visit Osaka myself almost exactly a year from now, and when I do, I’ll ask myself if I could live in Osaka. But could I live in Mexico City?

I wrote earlier of my impression that, if I couldn’t live in Los Angeles, I would live in Mexico City. This remains true, although bear in mind that I’m choosing only from the major cities I’ve spent real time in. The list doesn’t include New York, and everyone tells me I’d bow down in devotion to New York if only I gave it a try. But for a guy like me, wouldn’t living in New York strike you as somewhat… obvious?

Here, to continue the Momus-blockquoting, is the thing about cities like New York:

Increasingly, my outlook has Berlinified, by which I mean I regard expensive cities like New York, London and Tokyo as unsuited to subculture. They’re essentially uncreative because creative people living there have to put too much of their time and effort into the meaningless hackwork which allows them to meet the city’s high rents and prices. So disciplines like graphic design and television thrive, but more interesting types of art are throttled in the cradle.

For all the wealth of its wealthier neighborhoods, Mexico City still seems quite suited indeed to subculture. (Big, fast, delicious meals for two for the equivalent of five bucks, remember, though whether you can attain big, fast, delicious, and healthy for five bucks I haven’t determined.) I don’t know how much longer this will last — fifteen years? Twenty? — but it ranks high in the roundup of qualities with which el D.F. attracts me. Others include:

  • The “commercial spirit” which causes the city to bristle with businesses of all scales and levels of formality (or, especially, of informality)
  • The near-complete lack of the English language and Anglo-type people in public life (if travel teaches me one important lesson about myself, it teaches me that I prefer being an extranjero)
  • The fast, far-reaching subway (L.A.’s metro system may feel “nicer,” but right now it runs only about half the number trains the city needs, for half the distance they need to go)
  • The bold, triumphalist, slightly futuristic, but still worn and askew aesthetic of the built environment
  • The fascination of an international metropolis as filtered through a very particular Latin American sensibility
  • The all-pervasive food culture, the well-curated reading culture, and the still-scrappy gallery culture

These qualities, I suspect, would wear me down over time:

  • The seeming inability to provide uninterrupted power (not so important) and water (hell of important)
  • The relative lack of Asian cultural influence (you find Korean and Japanese people here, for example, but they seem only to run restaurants, not supermarkets or bookstores)
  • The ceaseless hard sell of ambulatory vendors and the employees of certain eateries (“Amigo? Amigo? Amigo? Amigo? Amigo?“)
  • The unusually fraught act of street-crossing

Realistically, though, I wouldn’t completely give up my footing in L.A. for one in Mexico City — not this decade, anyway. The optimal solution strikes me as living in L.A. for half the year or more, and then spending a decent chunk to half of the rest of the year living in a place like Mexico City. Peter Greenaway’s onetime composer Michael Nyman does this with el D.F. and London; until very recently, Donald Keen did it for a decades with New York and Tokyo. This way of playing it strongly appeals to me, since it allows you to maintain a fresh pair of eyes on your surroundings at all times. Some people react to the idea of living in two places as a real Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous move, but I’m talking about pulling it off in as frugal a manner as possible. Given the money I’ll save by not raising kids — assuming I, uh, start making money at some point — I suspect this lays closer to reach than it seems.

I’ve left plenty of water in the Mexico City pump (when it, ahem, pumps at all) for next time. My tally of places I meant to experience but didn’t manage to this time out include the Cineteca Nacional (shockingly), Vips (a sort of Mexican Denny’s), galleries like Kurimanzutto and OMR, and the yoga classes that have apparently started up in the still-stained-by-fake-Total Recall-blood Chacabano subway station.

But we did get to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and few things, to my mind, represent my impression of Mexico better than this sweeping, audacious statement of mid-seventies cement modernism brimming with the grimly solemn-faced devout who nevertheless dress in the oddest possible clothing: NASCAR jerseys, off-pink track uniforms, revived leisure suits. (If you want a quick shot of Mexico City’s general “vibe,” Carlos Reygadas’ Battle in Heaven delivers it more accurately than anything else I’ve seen.)

But at the Basilica, I found my specific Mexico City envoy of choice: a six-year-old kid in an oversized anime t-shirt, big grin on his face, reflexively imitating the adults around him shuffling on their knees toward the Virgin, holding aloft a churro.

 

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Diario de Ciudad de México IX

Saturday, November 12, 2011

I came to Mexico City with many priorities, and Cuban ice cream without the promise to buy ranked high among them. We showed up to Mercado Medellín looking for it, but I nearly broke into a flop sweat upon seeing that that, for whatever reason — too late? Some sort of holiday? — most of its shops had shuttered themselves for the day. (And by “shuttered themselves,” I mean “covered themselves with sheets of burlap.”) But the moment I even suspected I’d come upon the right place, I asked, in what Spanish I could muster, if this was where you eat Cuban ice cream. “It’s not Cuban ice cream,” the fellow responded in, as usual, much better Spanish than mine. Just when the confused disappointment started rising, he added, “It’s ice cream as they eat it in Cuba. To be Cuban ice cream, we would need to be in Cuba, so this is not Cuban ice cream.” I immediately ordered a couple scoops of the flavors whose names I didn’t recognize — my standard dessert-ordering practice in Mexico — and apologized for my bad Spanish. The Cuban ice cream man assured me that he understood, and told me that if you want to learn a language, all you need is space. I told him I’d remember it.

Despite my near-certainty that we wouldn’t do anything as touristy as visiting ruins, a chance encounter presented us with the opportunity to spend a day visiting Teotihuacán, the pre-Aztec city “where men become gods.” Today, it’s the place where men become whistle-sellers. Most of the wandering vendors there (whose trinkets our guide strenuously instructed us not to buy) push a sort of kazoo which, as they repeatedly demonstrate, produces eagle and jaguar noises. Madelaine suspects fraud; she thinks those guys just make the animal sounds with their voices, that the instruments do nothing. Me, I want to interview a couple of ’em to find out exactly what it feels like to blow whistles at blank-faced tourists for ten hours a day.

I met a middle-aged Peruvian couple in the van to Teotihuacan who, sensing my eagerness to practice Spanish, took every opportunity to engage me in conversation. They did a fine job of pitching Lima to me as a destination, although I’d visit any South American city that has such a rich mixture of British, German, French, Jewish, Chinese, and Japanese for a population. Despite struggling at times to understand their somewhat Italianate accent — another common cultural influence there, I take it — I learned much about their suspicion that South America might turn communist. Wondering aloud later about why every South American I meet seems to hate and/or fear both their local and regional political figures, a Chilean girl gave me a stern explanation that I think I mostly pretty much grasped. Kind of.

Checking out the lights at the Templo Mayor at night, we suddenly decided to take a few group pictures. Standard problem: since one of the group always has to take the picture, one of the group’s always missing from the picture. A potential solution presented itself in the form of a vanful of Korean Christians making a prayer stop nearby. While each and every one of my friends around had me out-Spanished, out-Japanesed, or both, only I could claim any knowledge of Korean. But when I tried to summon the words to ask these Koreans if one of them could take our picture, I came up absolutely dry. Engaged in a weeks-long struggle with Spanish and Japanese, I had inadvertently pushed Korean so far to the back of my mind that I could hardly dig out “안녕하세요.” Embarrassing? Oh yes. But ten minutes back in L.A. should set this right.

Looking for an anthology of pieces to get you in the Mexico City mindset? I recommend Rubén Gallo’s The Mexico City Reader, which I should thank right now for introducing me to the invaluable D.F. chroniclers Carlos Monsiváis and Jorge Ibargüengoitia. (I tried to buy a whole volume of Ibargüengoitia’s writings from an alleyway bookseller, but he just wouldn’t budge from 50 pesos, and I wouldn’t sacrifice my manhood by shelling out.) Gallo writes in his introduction:

I decided to select only nonfiction essays and to focus on crónicas — short texts that are a cross between literary essay and urban reportage, and usually read like journal entries about a writer’s experience of the city. Although there are many novels — like Luis Zapata’s El vamprio de la colonia Roma — and poems — like Efraín Huerta’s Circuito interior — about life in post-1968 Mexico City, I focused on crónicas to make the book more original for North American readers: most Mexican poems and works of fiction are eventually translated into English, but crónicas rarely make it across the border, apparently because they constitute a hybrid genre which most publishers are afraid to touch. And it is precisely this hybrid quality that makes crónicas a perfect genre for writing about a city where everything — from architectural styles to social classes — is jumbled, chaotic, and falls in between traditional categories.

Literary essay? Urban reportage? Hybrid genre? Sounds like the form for me. I do wonder what about crónicas I can import and adapt into writing about other cities, but first I’ll need to pump up my Spanish reading level more than a bit. As incentives to do so, I scoured the bookstores of Donceles street and came away with Tiempo mexicano, Carlos Fuentes’ book of crónicas — why not start at the height of the augustness, I say — Cantar de ciegos, one of Fuentes’ short story collections, the non-Mexican Julio Cortázar’s Bestiario, and the D.F.-born, hook-hand-wielding Mario Bellatin’s La jornada de la mona y el paciente. Madelaine picked up a couple by J.M. Servin, an as-yet never translated Mexico City memoirist-novelist whom I sense would make a fine interview indeed for my next podcasting/broadcasting project.

(By way of full disclosure, I also dropped the pesos on a slick new Latin American edition of Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart. As if to balance out that expense, I happened to find a Korean-language guide to Spain laying around, which I choose to interpret as a sign from the universe to get my speaking skills in shape before I run into a Christian van there, too.)

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Diario de Ciudad de México VIII

Friday, November 11, 2011

As luck would have it, the camote man turned up on my birthday. We’d put away beer after beer and pizza after pizza, I had a birthday brownie (fully equipped with ice cream) comin’ my way, and there came a whistle so plaintive it could have only one source. While indeed plaintive, the whistle also has the quality of “extreme volume,” so a friend easily tracked the man down and had him wheel over to our table. One of the Japanese people I’d only just met bought me a camote with condensed milk. Some brave entrepreneur needs to import this ancient tradition into Los Angeles.

(The ancient tradition of Japanese people buying me sweet potatoes.)

My experience of D.F. eating culture mostly comes down to comida corrida, or street food. In line with the general phenomenon of every patch of open space becoming a store, many of those stores sell tacos, quesadillas, sincronizadas, tortas, huaraches, flautas, sopes, gorditas, empanadas, pan dulce, fruit with chili and lime, prepared tamarind… the list goes on. You find good things to eat on almost every city block. (You also find less appealing stands that sell what I call “sun-dried sushi.”) We’ve eaten full meals, and eaten well, for around five U.S. bucks. Not to say that you can’t go all-out; when friends took us to Roma’s famous Contramar, we ate a meal we’ll never forget — and it still cost about two-thirds of what an equivalent L.A. restaurant would have. If an equivalent exists.

One possible structuring principle for a future Japan trip: go from jazz club to jazz club to jazz club. Given Japan’s large, enthusiastic jazz culture, this would ensure a rich experience. The same goes for Mexico City coffee culture; on some days, the drive to find the next coffee shop seemed to hold everything together. I need give you no more detailed a starting point than the café de olla found at Coyoacán’s Café El Jarocho.

This reminds me to reflect upon how much sweeter a café de olla tastes than anything I get into the habit of drinking — or eating, for that matter — in L.A. Vast swaths of Mexico City’s culinary scene could take their slogan straight from those Juicy Fruit commercials of the late nineties: “Gotta Have Sweet ®”. I reached the apex of this at Churrería El Moro, an all-night churro joint in el Centro that offers four different kinds of hot chocolate, each sweeter than the last, for the express purpose of churro-dipping. (One even has what looks like a warning on its menu line: “MUY DULCE”.) I took two of these churros home with me but left them on the floor of a cab, which is the greatest loss anyone can experience.

A less appetizing element of that night in el Centro: digging to build a new Metrobús station, a crew seemed to have hit a sewer line, smelling up the whole block and beyond with human poop. This rarely happens in the States, but then again, you don’t get a bus service as good as the Metrobús in the States. Six of one, half-dozen of the other.

If you go to Coyoacán for a café de olla, do pay visits to Frida Kahlo’s house and, a few blocks away, Leon Trotsky’s house, both of which stand as museums about their former residents. I don’t have to tell you to go to those, actually; almost every foreigner seems to. While I have no particular love of -isms, I gather that Leon Trotsky’s fans consider him the one communist you can like without getting too much historical blood on your hands. How they feel about the Negritos machine installed in his backyard I cannot discern.

Speaking Spanish and Japanese, languages I don’t even understand well enough to call “second,” brings to mind a piece of research I once read about. I can’t find the original now, but, in gist form, it found that autistic men marry foreign wives much more often than non-autistic men do. (Here’s an Asperger’s-type forum thread discussing it.) We’ve all met the caricature couples of socially maladroit men with wives from halfway across the world (usually Asia, in my experience), and it’s easily observed that ladies who come from other cultures don’t care about or, often, even notice the quirks that put off their men’s own countrywomen. But I bet the obvious and thus acknowledged communication barrier between partners from different cultures also wards off the kind of misunderstandings that come from the assumption that two people, by virtue of being born in the same country and natively speaking the same language, can and should communicate with perfect clarity, as if by telepathy.

One of our Japanese friends doesn’t live in Mexico City; she quit her job in Tokyo and came to visit her sister here for a few months. Discussing this in Spanish, I’ve heard the verb “renunciar” come up. It means “to quit” or “to resign,” but I like the sound of it: “She renounced work.” After two and a half months of my current, very unsustainable lifestyle, I’ve begun to feel like I, myself, have renounced work.

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Diario de Ciudad de México VII

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Mexico City has three major department stores, each of which began as an importer from a different region: Liverpool, Sanborns, and El Palacio de Hierro. Some of the latter two feel truly-old school, like how I imagine the American department stores circa 1960. They’ve got doormen, they’ve got fine chocolate sections, they’ve got restaurants, and they’ve got bars separate from the restaurants. (El Palacio de Hierro also provides me with the only way I can consistently make locals laugh: “Soy Totalmente Palacio” jokes. Interestingly, all those brash ads belie the store’s deep frumpiness.) For my purposes, they’ve got bathrooms. Reliable public facilities being hard to find in el D.F., I see those red Sanborns owls or that huge cursive “PH” and feel sweet relief a-comin’. Though I’d assumed that the nickname “Sanbaños” would have entered common usage decades ago, I find I may actually have coined it. (On the internet, anyway.)

Speaking of, most of the upscale-ish bathrooms here employ an odd faucet design: you push a stick that pokes out of the spout in any direction, and only when you hold it down does water come out. I’ve asked if this has to do with water conservation or something, but most people just act surprised that these faucets don’t exist in the States.

While making the long, winding, often M.C. Escher-ish walk between two connections in a subway station, we found ourselves at the head of a parade. Encircled  by a squad of federal police, a section of UNAM’s marching band celebrated some sort of victory by making serious noise in the cement corridors. (For the recording enthusiasts out there, late-sixties subway stations offer a very “live” sonic environment indeed.) This immediately and simultaneously struck me as “something you wouldn’t see outside Mexico City,” “something that makes me want to live in Mexico City,” and “something that would get irritating if I did live in Mexico City, but not if I could keep a fresh perspective on it.”

The streets of el D.F. provide unusual, fascinating, or just surreal things on the street each and every day. Alas, according to the unflinching principle of yin and yang, it also serves up a number of horrific sights. Madelaine expressed a kind of disturbed awe (or awed disturbance) at the sight and sound of a battered-looking and drugged-acting woman warbling karaoke on the subway for money, portable amplifier and dazed young son in tow. “Don’t look at her,” she insisted to me. Later that night, we also had to pass through some sort of glue-sniffer alley to get out of the Insurgentes station (also known as the site of Total Recall‘s JohnnyCab chase). If it’s any consolation, glue-sniffers aren’t dangerous; they just sort of slump there and stare at you.

Farther down Insurgentes — and, need I add, in broad daylight — I paid a visit to the previously mentioned Condominio Insurgentes, a grandiose condominium tower dating from a previous era of Mexico City prosperity now reduced to a squat by damage from 1985 earthquake and various ensuing fires. It looks exactly like the pictures, and the dead husk of living spaces really does sprout from a reasonable healthy ground floor (“planta baja” en español) of all kinds of shops, including a sushi bar. Madelaine didn’t seem to want to go upstairs, but from what I saw of the inside, holes pepper the entire building. I guess it’s too extensively damaged to repair and too big to remodel at a reasonable cost. See also my Marketplace of Ideas interview with Daniel Hernandez where, at the very end, he describes attending a rave on the top floor.

Not to get too grand about this, but I would submit that Mexico City offers not beauty, and not ugliness, but a kind of flamboyant a-aesthetics that goes beyond beauty and ugliness. Mexico City either doesn’t know or doesn’t care what’s aesthetically appealing and what isn’t, and I find that refreshing.

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Diario de Ciudad de México VI

Monday, November 7, 2011

I’ve talked to Peruvians, Germans, Frenchmen, Australians, and Japanese on this trip, and they’ve all told me that the unwarranted fear of Mexico City in their home country matches or exceeds the level I saw and heard in the United States. Turns out that most of el D.F. actually feels safer than major metropolitan areas in the United States. ¨You come from Los Angeles,¨ said a concerned Mexican taxi driver. ¨Isn’t there a lot of violence there?¨

If you’re going to die prematurely in Mexico City, I wager you’ll do it crossing the street. Most intersections don’t have any lights for pedestrians, and when they do, the lights often show confusing combinations like a walking green man below a standing silver man or a green man and a red one simultaneously. Even then, drivers don’t really stop for you; most just kind of swerve around. I’ve developed two reliable methods to get across Mexico City streets: (1) wait until cars stack up at a stoplight, then walk safely through the middle, or (2) only cross when Mexicans cross. Somehow, they just know.

When last I saw Los Angeles, it had begun yielding to a siege of ads for Jack and Jill, Adam Sandler’s new drag comedy. The same thing’s happening in Mexico City, except the posters and billboars prominently feature some guy named Eugenio Derbez. Sometimes they only feature Eugenio Derbez. Turns out he’s a famous comedian here, born and raised in el D.F. He, too, has a drag role in the film, playing both ¨Felipe¨ and ¨Felipe’s Grandmother.¨

 

A few more facts for Asperger’s-ravaged rapid transit enthusiasts like myself: Mexico City metro trains run on rubber wheels, which go easier on the unstable soil beneath. They also have the only openable windows I’ve ever seen on a subway, which do let in a much-needed breeze. In a nod to illiterate riders, each station has its own icon representing the locality’s history, culture, or landmarks. A gringo actually created them: Lance Wyman, the graphic designer behind Washington D.C.’s metro map. I desire only one souvenir of el D.F.: a poster with all 150-odd metro icons. But no luck finding one yet.

I haven’t ridden many buses here, although in the Pasadena-like area of Coyoacán I tried out a pasero, a sort of puttering green van that stops whenever and wherever any rider or anyone on the street says to. (I think Philippine jeepneys operate on a similar principe, but I won’t find out for sure until April.) I also rode to UNAM’s campus on a system called the Metrobús, a network of large buses, wider even than subway trains, that go back and forth in their own dedicated lanes. Though usually against buses in all their forms, I kind of like the Metrobús for its speed, comfort, and general non-shoddiness. It brings to mind what I think L.A.’s rapid bus lines are trying to do, but without their own lanes — so, uh, not. Get that purple line drilled west, L.A.!

Public transit aside, every single vehicle I’ve ridden in has had a 5-speed transmission. Not an automatic in sight. Do I chalk this up, I wonder, do economic concerns, to quirks of manufacturing history, to Mexican driving culture, or what? I just feel relieved that nobody has called on to drive a car in Mexico City, since I haven’t put my hand on a gearshift in a decade. I’d look like an old driver’s-ed student. (And then there’s the traffic.)

I bitch and moan about how L.A. subway riders don’t understand the concept of standing on one side of the escalator and walking on the other, but I’ve found that chilangos never even try to walk up the escalator. What, no places to go, no people to see?

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Diario de Ciudad de México V

Monday, November 7, 2011

became aware of myself pretending i had been asked to choose two countries to remain in existence and me choosing ‘mexico and japan’

– Tao Lin

 

Much of the Mexico City exploration we’ve done in the past week, we’ve done in the company of three Japanese ladies: two D.F. residents, one visitor. Our group has these linguistic ranges:

  • Native Japanese, good Spanish, pretty good English
  • Native Japanese, good Spanish
  • Native Japanese, difficult-to-discern understanding (but not speaking) of English
  • Native English, pretty good Japanese, some Spanish
  • Native English, reasonable Spanish, parched bare bones of Japanese

My English, needless to say, hasn’t seen a lot of action lately. I actually feel a certain friction writing these posts in English, although I’m sure that’ll dissipate as soon as I ritualistically kiss the Los Angeles ground. But hey, what they say about even a short time in another country vastly improving your ability to speak its language(s)? Truth. My Spanish, which now sucks, used to blow chunks. And my Japanese now blows chunks!

A line from my eventual biography: ¨He turned 27 precisely as God intended him to: in the heart of Mexico, surrounded by Japanese people.¨ I find that one Japanese person tends to know another, and it’s true in el D.F.: I ate my birthday dinner at a table with at least eight of them, only one of whom knew any English. (But if you have the means, I do recommend the choice cultural experience of speaking Spanish to Japanese people.) Several are artists who find Mexico City a much more suitable working environment than their homeland. I asked one of them what he likes about this city. Ï love pollution,¨ he replied, either in Spanish or Japanese, I forget. I asked another if the food’s any good at the Japanese restaurant that provides her day gig; her opinion remains unclear.

We went to a temazcal, a pre-Hispanic sauna that involves singing, drum-beating, self-flagellation with aromatic branches, and total, utter, darkness. Never have I so enjoyed profuse sweating. A local joined us in the dome partway through, and I discussed with him about the stark contrast between Mexico City’s reputation of violence and its actual level of violence. (He claimed that it’s actually the safest big city in Mexico. I’ll look into it.) ¨Un temezcal con dos gringos y tres japonesas,¨ I said to him. ¨¿Qué sorpresa, no?¨

Taxi driver to main Japanese friend: ¨¿Usted es la china?¨ ¨No soy china,¨ she replied, for probably not even the hundredth time.

For Dia de los Muertos — an important holiday down here, I can assure you — we visited the campus of UNAM, the largest university in Latin America. They do it up every year with dozens upon dozens of themed altars. For this year’s theme, not only did they select Jorge Luis Borges — whose writing gave me a damned good reason to get interested in the Spanish-speaking world in the first place — they specifically selected his story ¨The Aleph¨, which, back in the States, we’ve been (slowly) shooting a short film inspired by. Amidst all the revelry, trying to explain this to las Japonesas felt like perhaps the most Colin-like thing I’ve ever done. At least before the inevitable blackout.

For Noche de Brujas — a less important holiday down here, which falls on the day of U.S. Halloween — kids trick-or-treat. I got a lot of plastic buckets held up in my face, and my lack of candy forced me to feign a total lack of understanding of the Spanish language. Later, one of las Japonesas informed me that the kids don’t want sweets; they want money. No wonder that little clown squirted me with his flower.

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