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Diario de Ciudad de México IV

Saturday, November 5, 2011

If I had to describe the difference between Mexico City and other cities as succinctly as possible, I would say this: when a space in Mexico City can become a store, it does become a store. This goes for parks, sidewalks, rickety bridges, and subway stations alike. (We´ve also exited several stations directly into sprawling complexes of tent markets. One of those complexes deposited us into an amusement park.) In subway trains, you see (and hear) not just a louder variety of the candy sellers on the L.A. metro, but  also blind people wearing backbacks with boom box components grafted into them. They blast clips of as many songs as possible between stops in order to hawk CDs of the greatest hits of las setenta, las ochenta, y las noventa, la musica mas bonita del mundo. Or so I’m told.

Cargo pants never went out of style in el D.F. They just became… more cargo-panty. Many Mexican men dress very well indeed — this could turn into the men’s style city to beat in a few years, once the suits lose their synthetic shine — but others wear a style of pant I’ve never seen anywhere else: cargo jeans that appear asymmetrically sewn together out of dozens of jagged panels. Yesterday I spotted a pair of these pants with cargo pockets on their cargo pockets, which felt like insanity.

In El Monstruo, which I brought to read in the D.F. even as I experience it, the late John Ross writes about the used book stores of Donceles Street. When David Lida mentioned them as well, I knew I had to get out there. Businesses cluster geographically in Mexico City in a way I haven´t seen them do elsewhere, and damn, does Donceles have a lot of used book stores. Some of them seem to have endured floods, resulting in stock that’s perhaps less pristine than I´d like, but I´ve nevertheless managed to pick up a few Carlos Fuentes books in cool old paperback editions.

Mexico City’s reading culture interests me. Books cost slightly less here than they do in the States, but as a percentage of the average wage, they might qualify as mild luxury items. When defeños read, they seem to do it with good taste: bookstores often dedicate sections to curation-inclined publishers with a solid aesthetic sense (Sexto Piso comes to mind), and I’ve seen 1Q84 in even the shiniest, mainstreamiest department-store book shelves — though right alongside Nicholas Sparks in translation.

A couple blocks from where we´re staying stands parked a gleaming fleet of eighteen motorcycles tricked out with pizza-warming boxes. They deliver for the local Domino’s, which suprised me by being not a take-your-shit-and-get-out type of establishment but, as we say in the States, a genuine ¨sit-down restaurant.¨ No word if actual Domino’s pizza tastes better in el D.F., and I´m not about to investigate.

Some food carts here sell cigarettes indvidually. If you want to buy a pack instead, be apprised that, by some sort of fiat, they all come emblazoned with stickers of various troubling images. It seems like manufacturers can choose between ¨gross teeth,¨¨gray fetus,¨and ¨girl weeping over open coffin.¨ Madelaine offered to buy me a birthday cigar at a pretty swank store, but all this visual drama distracted me. Which I guess is the point. But still.

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Diario de Ciudad de México III

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

In terms of scope, diversity, and improvisatory growth, you could almost consider Mexico City the Los Angeles of the south. The analogy works as far down to (and probably best at) the level of neighborhoods. La Condesa, where we’re staying, is Hollywood; both afford their residents ample opportunities for outdoor dining and ample quantities of dog-walking couples of all sexes. The older, more tightly-packed El Centro, where we roamed around today looking for used books (Carlos Fuentes, Mario Bellatin, Haruki Murakami en español), is downtown. My own neighborhood in L.A., Koreatown, would be the Zona Rosa — or at least the edges of it, where you find all the Koreans and street food. Las Lomas would be Beverly Hills, because I’ve seen it compared to Beverly Hills in articles.

If YHWH commanded me to live in any city I’ve been to except Los Angeles, even just my brief experience so far has convinced me that I would live in Mexico City. I feel confident in this claim, since I’ve already experienced a couple of the place’s major downsides. Despite assurances from locals that the water problems inherent in a city this huge and dry don’t often get in the way, we’ve had two water outages in three days. The second time, I quickly grew terrified that I wouldn’t get a morning shower, which is the worst thing that has ever happened to anyone. A mezcal tonic helped resolve this situation.

You feel the other obvious mark in the negative column — and this one everyone who writes about Mexico City, even its defenders, bemoans — when the subway gets crowded. I actually like riding the metro here, mostly due to the frequency of the trains and the whole system’s slightly faded sixties-Utopian aesthetic. (If I trace my interest in Mexico City back to the very beginning, I land on Total Recall, much of which Paul Verhoeven shot in a couple metro stations around here. I couldn’t get over how those backgrounds looked so futuristic, yet so old.) The crunch of humanity as rush hour nears seems tolerable — human adaptability is a wonderful thing — but ask me again the next time it rains too much, all the trains grind to a halt, and all the tunnels drop into darkness for fifteen or twenty minutes.

I told someone here that I like living in Los Angeles because of the whole world-in-microcosm thing, how you can go from country to country without ever leaving city limits. She nodded and replied, ¨Sí, como EPCOT!¨

Through rigorous testing, we have developed and refined this traveling method:

  1. Eat breakfast
  2. Walk around the city all morning
  3. Eat street food
  4. Walk around the city all afternoon
  5. Sleep, maybe
  6. Drink coffee all evening (and walk around the city)

Feel free to apply this method in the rest of the world’s great metropolises.

Each and every night, I keep my ears open for the forlorn whistle of the camote man. No dice yet. I don’t think he gets around to Condesa much.

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Diario de Ciudad de México II

Sunday, October 30, 2011

On the ride in from the airport, I immediately saw my first Mexican thing: a hunched fellow pedaling a bicycle loaded down with a five-foot-wide pallet of cookies and pork skins. On the freeway. Inches from traffic. We entered a tunnel, and I saw my second Mexican thing: a line of pedestrians shambling toward the Basílica, also inches from traffic. When we emerged from the tunnel, I saw my third Mexican thing: an enormous movie theater complex giving top marquee space to Johnny English.

Outside the Museo Nacional de Antropología, a thirteen-year-old girl with her dad and brother in tow stopped us and asked if we had time to give an interview. She had to interview people in English for school, and what better place to do that than on the steps of the most foreigner-attracting instutition in the city? She asked all the standard questions about where we live, if we’ve visited Mexico before, our favorite thing about Mexico (the food), and if we believe all the media heat about Mexico’s violence (nah). But then she asked the most inadvertently incisive question of all: ¨Did you come to relax, or to know Mexico?¨

I hadn’t seen many Asian people around until arriving at  the museum. We pulled over one group of girls, asked them if they were Japanese, and explained that, no, we weren’t Mexican. Madelaine asked them how they liked Mexico, which drew a collective shrug. The one from Osaka got a little more excited (but only a little) upon hearing that we’re going to Osaka next year.

(Still haven’t spotted any black people, though.)

This evening, I recorded a Marketplace of Ideas interview with David Lida, author of First Stop in the New World, one of the main books I read to prepare myself for Mexico City. The others included Daniel Hernandez’s Down and Delirious in Mexico City (I interviewed him about his book earlier) and John Ross’ El Monstruo, which I’m finishing here. We had a post-interview drink of mezcal, which Madelaine very accurately described as a ¨liquid cigar.¨ For whatever reason, I desire few things in life more than a drink that tastes like a smoke.

Waiting to fly out of LAX, I saw a banner emblazoned with the face of Mayor Villaraigosa and the words, ¨Welcome to Los Angeles: the City That’s a World in Itself¨ (or something like that). This sounds on one level like garden-variety meaningless civic boosterism, but on another level, it’s the entire reason I moved there! Mexico City has an impressive internationalism — I plan to visit its equivalent of my L.A. neighborhood, Koreatown, soon — but even here, you don’t get the experience of traveling from country to country every few blocks.

One mid-twentysomething Mexican to another mid-twentysomething Mexican walking alongside him: ¨¿Eres feliz, bro?¨

 

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Diario de Ciudad de México I

Saturday, October 29, 2011

I´d write at greater length, but this Mexican keyboard slows me down. This strikes me as a challenge basically identical to the guy in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly who has to write by repeatedly telling a nurse when to stop cycling through the alphabet. I´m a regular Jean-Do in Mexico.

(Except Jean-Do didn’t have to endure Windows mistakenly underlining his every word as misspelled.)

Note to those considering Aeroméxico for their civil aviation needs: they don’t have self-check-in machines for you, nor do they have a shorter line if you aren’t checking luggage. And believe you me, Aeroméxico passengers check themselves a lot of luggage.

Met a late-middle-aged couple on the flight. They live in Newport Beach most of the year, but come down to the house they own in Acapulco to ride Harleys the rest of the year. ¨We ask and ask our friends to join us,¨ the wife lamented, ¨but they’re too afraid of getting their heads cut off. I say, if you’re going to think that way, why bother living at all?¨ Tell it, sister.

(¨Heads cut off¨?)

We’re staying right across the street from the Centro Cultural Bella Época, a combination of cafe, theater, and the largest book store in Latin America — in other words, the ideal place for me to stay across the street from. Half of its shelves offer Haruki Murakami novels or books related to Haruki Murakami in some way. 1Q84 recently came out here, so maybe that has something to do with it, but I’ve long felt a resonance with the Spanish-language literary world in Murakami that I can’t properly describe. (Not with this Mexi-keyboard, anyway.) Sam Anderson’s New York Times Magazine profile of Murakami reinforces a notion I’ve harbored: I so often return to Murakami not for his Japaneseness, but for his internationalist Japaneseness. (Recall his trip to Stockholm to dig crates for classic American jazz records, watching Godard DVDs along the way.) This may well hold for every Japanese thing I follow, except maybe Ozu.

Every Mexico City business I’ve thus far patronized has about thrice as many employees as its U.S. equivalent would. It sounds irritating to have a lot of extras hanging around, but I enjoy the attentive service experience. (I do wish waiters wouldn’t stand there staring at me while I count out my cash, but hey.) Highly beneficial side effect: this is one of the cleanest cities I’ve ever visited, except Vancouver. (No city’s as clean as Vancouver.)

In line with the waiters and street-sweepers, there are cops and security guards everywhere. That bookstore I mentioned has the same level of security as a small-town prison — wait, a medium-town prison.

I see more dogs  and a greater variety of them in Condesa, the neighborhood I’m staying in, than anywhere else I’ve recently visited. These people love their pups, however oddly shaped or scabby. The dogs stay clean, though, through creative business ideas like ¨Condesa’s Fluffy Shower¨, a truck containing a shower for dogs. I saw a line of panting clients chained to various trees next to the Fluffy Shower’s parking space.

Much of my Spanish listening practice over the last few months has come from Cinemanet, a podcast seemingly associated with Mexico City’s Cineteca Nacional. What’s screening at the Cineteca while I’m in town? Oh nothing, JUST A BELA TARR RETROSPECTIVE. (And a Naomi Kawase series, speaking of los Japoneses.) It really is my birthday. In like a week, anyway.

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The Korean Hal Hartley: “Whatever can be defined, it is bullshit.”

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Upon moving to Los Angeles, I made it a priority to visit the Korean Cultural Center, a combined museum, screening room, language school, and library of Korea-related materials. I’ll start taking classes there next year, but I didn’t want to wait to get a library card. I first checked out Huh Moonyung’s Hong Sangsoo, the entry in Seoul Selection’s “Korean Film Directors” series on my favorite Korean filmmaker of them all.

To people who haven’t heard of him — and in the States, many of remain, even among cinephiles — I describe Hong as “the Korean Hal Hartley.” Often, this doesn’t clarify much, but despite struggling to share my enthusiasm, I find myself drawn more and more frequently to his worldview and the way he structures and aestheticizes it through cinema. I’ve picked quotes from the interview with Hong that makes up the book’s middle that best give you an idea of how he thinks and creates (bolding mine):

  • “During the process of meeting actors, they remind me of the people that I have known in the past and the fragments of events I have experienced with them. Everything that I encounter during filming can stimulate me. For example, I could remember a past event while listening to a conversation of crew members the night before, or the weather at the location that day could stimulate me somehow. Everything that surrounds me could potentially stimulate me as the starting point for the details of what I need to film that day. That is the reason why I [write the script] the morning of the shoot.”
  • “I believe that my films are not made to express a story, but to feature some fragments. I don’t think I have any other option. I take those so-called fragments and, with them, derive a whole structure centered on everyday situations. And within that structure, I select appropriate rhetoric. And when I go into the shoot, a new process of discovery begins.”
  • “My drawing teacher in college wrote in my recommendation letter I had a strange sense of humor. That was the first time I heard of it. I find it fortunate that my wife laughs at my jokes from time to time. If one looks at each slice of life without being so self-centered, so impulsive, so purpose-driven, then the arrangement of those familiar slices will escape from being clichés and even become the basis of strange humor.”
  • “I want fragments first to be picked up and then for them to form a movie. I want to make one body that can hold all pieces even though they seem contradictory or unrelated to each other. For me, making a movie is about what I choose and how I arrange them.”
  • “I went through puberty clinging onto ideals such as absolute truth, perfect world, absolute purity, etc. Everything I had encountered in life was automatically compared against an ideal value. I failed to comprehend things in life that couldn’t be incorporated into that ideal system. So, my life became fraught with schizophrenia asking why reality cannot easily converge with these beautiful ideals. Only when I reached my 20s did I fortunately begin to see the falsehood behind those ideals and began to better appreciate life, that is, as it is. Characters in my movies reflect such experiences. Specific characters chase after clichéd ideals, or even get chased by them, but I want my gaze on these characters to be composed from visions that are free from these clichés. To those characters, the conflict between ideals and life that veer away from these ideals is very painful. I want to say that all these pains are actually unnecessary. It’s the ideals that are the essence of the problem, not life itself.”
  • “I welcome strange coincidences and think that they are like a wedge driven into the frame of a banal and conventional mind.”
  • “I don’t feel disappointed [with poor reception] as long as there is a dialogue between the audience and me.”
  • “I had thought providing a simplified monotonous background [in Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors] would make it easier for the audience to visualize the contrasting contents better. But I think it may have been just a theoretical calculation. What’s more important is that I wanted to feature wintertime Seoul in black and white.”
  • “I think I was lazy my whole life. I would procrastinate as much as I can. At the last moment, when I can no longer procrastinate, some spontaneous thing happens in my actions. I always liked that.”
  • “I am cautious about the strong image that I have decided in my head in advance. They are mostly the result of a desire to reconstruct an image that I have seen from watching other people’s works.”
  • “There are men who feel that only with women can they feel an absolute sense of connection. I think it’s a good experience to go through that absolute kind of connectivity, be it one hour or a year. However, that very subjective experience may not be enough considering that our lifespan is longer than one hour or a year. The rest of time is too long. And so they fall in front of women continuously. But men haven’t defined what life is. Maybe it’s because whatever can be defined, it is bullshit. That’s why there can’t be a contract or a rule needed for minimal decency promised to women. That’s why it is difficult for women to begin a relationship with men with whom she can place a minimal amount of trust. A woman knows that she is getting tired, but she holds onto a relationship until she can trust. Men embrace women thinking that she is the only savior, but are nervous because they can already visualize the end even with their eyes closed.”
  • “I don’t have hobbies, but I do drink some.”

At the moment, I find Turning Gate, Night and Day, and Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (about which I wrote a Humanists column) Hong’s funniest and richest pictures. But if you’re in the Anglosphere, you’ll have an easier time finding Woman is the Future of Man, The Power of Kangwon Provice, and Woman on the Beach.

Trailers usually make me less interested in films, not more, but this one promoting Hong’s latest, The Day He Arrives, strongly suggests that someone at TrailerCo’s doing their job at last:

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To go with my new writing space, my new career

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

From Donald Richie’s Japan Journals:

Called a flâneur in print. Looked it up. “Witty, insouciant, man of the world.” Like that very much. Also, “not serious.” Like that even better. It is like being a dandy without having to pay tailoring bills. An element of pose and nothing, such as earnestness, to mar the effect. Also, though this the dictionary does not say, someone who sees through appearances and who refuses to abide by the dull rules.

From the New Yorker’s profile of L.A. food critic Jonathan Gold:

For years, Gold’s itinerant eating seemed purposeless; then, suddenly, as with the hungry caterpillar in the Eric Carle book, there was a glorious, fully realized point to it. John Powers, a film critic who met Gold at the Weekly in the mid-eighties, when Gold was a proofreader there, says, “He has the flâneur instinct. In all those years, when his peers were very busy professionally writing, Jonathan was professionally wandering around not writing. By background, inclination, and practice, he has always been the one who knows the most stuff close to the ground.”

“Flâneur, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia“:

While Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as a “gentleman stroller of city streets”, he saw the flâneur as having a key role in understanding, participating in and portraying the city. A flâneur thus played a double role in city life and in theory, that is, while remaining a detached observer. This stance, simultaneously part of and apart from, combines sociological, anthropological, literary and historical notions of the relationship between the individual and the greater populace. After the 1848 Revolution in France, after which the empire was reestablished with clearly bourgeois pretensions of “order” and “morals”, Baudelaire began asserting that traditional art was inadequate for the new dynamic complications of modern life. Social and economic changes brought by industrialization demanded that the artist immerse himself in the metropolis and become, in Baudelaire’s phrase, “a botanist of the sidewalk”.

Clearly, I must append the list of jobs to which I’m best suited:

  1. Raconteur
  2. Provocateur
  3. Boulevardier
  4. Enfant terrible
  5. Flâneur
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Hello, world!

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

You can find all my old posts (but why would you want to?) going back to 2008-ish on colinmarshall.typepad.com, and going back to 2002 on colinmarshall.livejournal.com.

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The Marketplace of Ideas: ZBS Foundation President Thomas Lopez

Monday, April 20, 2009

Colin talks about creating radio fiction and humorously raising consciousness with Thomas Lopez, founder and president of the ZBS Foundation. This broadcast contains excerpts from the ZBS productions Dreams of the Amazon, Ruby and Two Minute Film Noir.

You can download the MP3 here or on iTunes.

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Colin Marshall

Sunday, January 1, 1984

… is a Seoul-based essayist, broadcaster, and public speaker on cities, language, and culture.

On my new Substack newsletter Books on Cities, I write long-form essay-reviews on exactly that.

You’ll find my essays here. I write for outlets including the New Yorker, Guardian Cities, Open Culture, the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books (including its Korea Blog), KCET, Boom: A Journal of California (and guest-edited its issue on architecture, infrastructure, and the built environment), Bookforum, Boing Boing, Put This On, The Japan Foundation, The Millions, 3Quarksdaily, The Quarterly Conversation, and Maximum Fun.

I’ve previously appeared on a Seoul urbanism radio feature on TBS eFM’s Koreascape as well as hosted and produced the world-traveling podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture [RSS] [iTunes], which evolved from the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas. 

My video essay series The City in Cinema examines cities (especially Los Angeles) as they appear on film.

My public speaking, which I’ve done in places like the Royal Asiatic Society Korea Branch, Portland’s Hollywood Theatre, the San Francisco Urban Film Festival, Seoul National University, Yonsei University, Chapman University, California State University Long Beach, and the Seoul Book and Culture Club, usually covers this same suite of cities-and-culture-related topics.

You can also keep up with me on Twitter and Facebook as well.

콜린 마샬은 도시와 문화를 포함해서 여러 주제들에 대하여 에세이를 쓰는 수필가이다. 그 에세이들은 <뉴요커>와 <가디언> 그리고 <로스 앤젤레스 리뷰 오브 북스> 같은 주로 영미권 매체에 실리고 또한 그는 한국 문학 잡지 <Axt>에 기고한 적이 있고 <동아일보>에 칼럼을 기고하고 있다. 모국인 미국에서 30년 넘게 살며 10년 동안 라디오 방송과 팟캐스트에서 인터뷰을 진행했다. 그 후에 로스앤젤레스의 한인타운을 거쳐 세계에서 제일 큰 한인타운인 서울로 이사왔다. 서울에 사는 동안 <콜린의 한국> 팟캐스트를 운영하며 작가와 교수을 비롯하여 건축가와 방송인 같은 다양한 사람들을 여전히 인터뷰한다. 첫 번째 책 <한국 요약 금지>는 2024년에 출판되었다.

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