wappo

a bunch of appo (popular assembly of peoples of oaxaca) kids taking over some billboards in posh polanco neighboorhood, méxicocity. i'm not into the type of politics these people are pushing, but i must admit this specific tactic is quite appealing. marcos, montblanc and nicolas cage. makes your stomach churn.

(clic on pic for more)

nOMAmeswey

no mames wey. (slang). mexican for “you’ve got to be f*cking kidding me”

“in 1810, mexico gained its independence from spain. 100 years later the mexican revolution began mexico’s political modernity. a century later mexico and its capital stand at the brink of another quantum leap: a nation at home in a globalized world, in which economic prosperity and a new cultural flourishing promise to transform the nation and its capital”

oma’s torre bicentenario 2010 (bicentennial tower) to become “the tallest skyscraper in the third world.”

mexico…celebrating 200 years of independence and 130 years of colonialist capitalism

found@noticiasdearquitectura

empire course 2

"america has changed me...i am now a much less private person, more open, prepared to say more. i have even changed my view of sexual love. in my other films, i looked upon sex as a disease of love. i learned here that sex is only a part of love; to be open and understanding of each other, as the girls and boys of today are, is the important part. but it is not fair to ask questions of me before i put my picture together. the responsibility is mine. it is me in front of the camera saying what I feel about my america."

anotnioni@trussel

*shot form zabriskie point

empire course

from the nyt:

in these five canvases (thomas) cole laid out the rise and fall of an unidentified but seemingly greco-roman empire, from “the savage state,” with hunters and gatherers foraging under forbidding skies, to “the arcadian or pastoral state,” in which the natives have acquired a temple and some landscaping skills. fast-forward to “the consummation of empire”: nature has been overrun by classical architecture (cole borrowed compositional ideas from j. m. w. turner’s painting “dido building carthage,” which he had seen in london) and regal processions. in “destruction” the state is swallowed by a tempest of smoke and fire; finally “desolation” reigns at the site, now a pile of rubble, with only decayed traces of humanity.

glossy grossy

don't get me wrong. i love city of sound. it's smart, sympa, and usually impeccable. i have a problem with monocle, though. i'm totally into the idea of working "with the system" or even "within the system" instead of "against the system" countercultural neohippie or neomarxist naomiklein crap that's been proven useless before. but sometimes, if you get fucked up the ass too much, you might start to actually like it and forget about the reason you accepted to take it in the first place. ¿what makes cities desirable? ¿livability? ¿what do the guys and gals at monocle mean by livability? ¿niceness, correctness? ¿managed, unconflictive diversity? ¿shinyhappydirtfree "urban villages"? my god, ¿what is this? ¿the XIXth century redux? a perfect little cityscape of delicious breads, cakes, "textured milk", special edition knitwear and outsanding service, a milanese laundry, fresh seasonal blooms "without a dyed carnation or celofane wrapper in sight"... jesusxist, ¿who are these people? ¿are they SERIOUS? ¿is this what snotty british folk crave? ¿this is your idea of global dynamics? ¿picking the bestest and cutiest boutiques and shops and espresso bars in the world and cramming them on a single street so you can walk back and forth in beautiful pointlessness? i probably wouldn't want to live in any of their top 20 liveable cities (¿honolulu?) anytime before i'm like 40 or something. and i already do... ¿am i wrong? ¿are my sensibility and my idea of what makes cities cities a result of me being damaged thirldworld goods? ¿am i the only one here who finds this neoaristocratic citybeautiful cityslick gross? ¿why am i writing my questions with upsidedown question marks at the beggining?

aqui (3) : nuevo centro

The city on its part has “relocated” informal commerce to streets outside of the restoration perimeter (an estimated 2000 vendors were removed, out of the 30,000 in the area and the ca. 300-400 thousand in the city), repaved streets, set up new lighting and strengthened security and supported the regularization of property and rent contracts. This year the federal government concluded the huge Plaza Juárez complex in front of the Alameda park, which will hold the Foreign Ministry and Supreme Court offices. Recently built or “recovered” monuments and buildings include the National Art Museum (MUNAL), The Central Post Office (Palacio de Correos), the City Theater (Teatro de la Ciudad), the Popular Arts and Crafts Museum (Museo de Artes Populares), and the Centro Cultural de España. Private developments include numerous luxury and business-class hotels (NH, Sheraton, Fiesta Inn, Holiday Inn, Gran Hotel de la Ciudad de México, the new Hotel Bamer, etc.), apartment complexes (Puerta Alameda, Motolinía 37, Vizcaínas, Venustiano Carrazna 17 –which is a proposal by local architect/celebrité Fernado Romero, Slim’s son-in-law—, 5 de mayo…), commercial/retail/entertainment sites (Plaza Hidalgo, Plaza Alameda, Sears Alameda, etc) and even student apartments in former hotels (Virreyes, Señorial, which used to be a sleazy bed-by-the-hour hotel). The rescate is directly connected to the other great urban development project in the city, the Reforma financial corridor, at Av. Juárez.


34 out of the 668 blocks that form the whole Centro Histórico area have been chosen as the “lucky few” in the first phase of the rescate; out of an estimated total of 70 buildings of “historical value” included in the program, Slim bought 62 of them for about $600 million Mexican pesos (around 43 million euro). In a sort of domino effect, the total private investment in terms of real estate in the area last year was calculated at around $4.5 billion Mexican pesos (over 320 million euro), poured into acquiring over 400 buildings for residential development. Rents, naturally, for an average 70m2 apartment have gone up from around 2,500 pesos (180 euro) to over 10,000 pesos (720 euro). Tourist activity in the area (lots of which is actually local/city residents riding the new two-tier Turibuses on the Centro Histórico route) has grown 30% in the last two years.


* imgs: apartments built on top of the ruins of el 33. new foreing affairs building in plaza juárez, by ricardo legorreta. repavement, calle independencia. (click for larger view)

aqui (3) : extinct/endangered

it all started with a night on the town. i led the group. we drove up eje central, and somehow missed el 33. we reached plaza garibaldi, u-turned for another try. nothing. we stopped the car. i crossed the street and realized when i reached the corner that the rubble in front of me was the 33, its remains, anyway. it had been demolished. bye bye. no more. nothing left. no one cares. i was shocked. i wanted to puke. i called miss m and gave her the tragic news. she thought i was joking. we never took pictures. a few weeks later we returned and a fugly "social housing" apartment block was being built. it was raining. a few months later, the hotel bamer, one of the last refuges in the centro (that kept its original progressive accretion of interior styles from 50's cool to 70's beaurocratic barroque) was closed for "refurbishment." i took pictures of the empty insides from the window. everything was gone or faded: the grand fiberglass greek sculptures and grand piano in the lobby, the mirrored walls and fake pink marble tables and coral-colored polyester roses of the bamerette (the cafeteria). i thought it was the end. i was desperate. the wasteland of crooked empty building skeletons that towered over the alameda as a testimony to the 1985 earthquake were cleansed and replaced with sparkling generic business class hotels.


the drive behind my work and involvement with the centro has been profoundly emotional. downtown mexico city is an area I’ve been fixed on making my own since i was a teenager. the more I scouted the centro, the more it became a place both exotic and intimate, a site of complexities: awful, decadent, vibrant, rude, stunning, nerve-racking, revealing. it stood as a total compression and concentration of what the city is, has been, could be. then the “rescate” (rescue) came. buildings have been demolished or revamped. empty lots turned into mixed-use developments with rooftop swimming pools. part of the centro has been permanently erased. nonetheless, instead of an attempt at saving hints of what’s left and retracing old places, i have tried to dissect the sites and processes of the gentrification scheme, hoping to build alternatives for reactivation instead of renewal.

aqui (2) : setting

after a series of much publicized (and all failed) attempts, just as the city seemed to give up on itself, yet another “rescue” of mexico city’s centro histórico (the “historic center”) was announced in 2001. according to the promoters of the regeneration scheme, the area had fast been falling into oblivion and decay, after a long period of systematic neglect and abandonment that began in the 1950s and turned to a full-flung physical and demographic emptying on the aftermath of the tragic earthquakes in september 1985 (30% of the area’s population was lost in the last 20 years). despite being proclaimed world heritage by the UNESCO in 1987, the centro was in a truly critical situation in terms of (lack of) preservation, insecurity (official statistics reported around 83 criminal offenses committed each day), informalization, and actual physical sinking (the centro tops the site of the ancient lakebed on which mexico city was originally founded).

the centro has been one of the more unstable sectors in the city throughout its history. it is also a place of incredible complexity—if not plain chaos—in cultural and social terms as well as in terms of landscape. over the last 30 years a series of major urban renewal/restoration projects have been proposed by successive local and federal governments. Most of them didn’t even get started, let alone achieve anything close to success. there was one substantial difference, though, this time round, which would give this rescate a whole new dimension. like the others before it, this program worked as a mixed venture of public (local and federal) funding and private investment. it also included a consulting organism with “civil society” representatives. the objectives and even the strategies of the program—at least on paper—were actually quite similar to those before it. the difference, though, was a certain someone named carlos slim, the number 2 guy on the forbes 100 richest people on earth list (currently there is some controversy about whether or not he's actually beat bill gates to number 1). slim justified his involvement in the project on somewhat sentimental (if not cynical) terms: the centro was his barrio, the neighborhood he grew up in, and he simply wanted to “give back”. not to call him a liar, but it was quite clear for almost anybody there was more to it.

today, when the rescate is in reaching the end of the first phase, the reasons are becoming even clearer. slim’s overwhelming influence in the city has turned to omnipresence in the centro. slim-owned sanborn’s restaurants and starbucks and 7-11s and mix-up record stores and suburbia or sears department stores and el globo bakeries are now ubiquitous around the newly-paved and restored blocks. telmex, the former state-owned telephone monopoly that slim bought in 1994 has not only installed public phone booths everywhere, but also has created a couple of telmex theaters and a telmex cultural center and a telmex technological institute and several telmex-funded art exhibitions and history museums in the central district. slim is the central figure behind the fundación centro histórico, a non-lucrative (sic) association responsible for steering practically every cultural event and program in the area (temporary exhibitions, concerts and festivals, art-student housing blocks, etc.), as well as supervising over historic building restoration and promoting the creation of a series of “corridors” (business, technology, cultural and entertainment) that conveniently touch and cross a good deal of slim blocks, slim lots and slim buildings. the fundación is conveniently close with the bienes raíces centro histórico (realty) group. as a sort of crown jewel, slim has aquired the emblematic torre latinoamericana, which was built in the 1950s and remained the tallest building in the city until the end of the 1970s, an absolute symbol of modernity and one of the two or three key reference points in the whole area.

aqui (1) : 33

towards the margins, friday everything’s fine. i met miss m for a beer. we chose el 33. tiny red tables and royal blue walls. the ceiling is covered with leftover balloons and mixed christmas poinsettas / saint valentine’s paper hearts. a woman with a deep voice singing an old bolero on the jukebox: podrás cambiar de nombre, de patria de todo, modificar tu rostro tu historia tu modo, pero por más que borres, que limpies, que cambies…la huella de mis besos tendrás en la cara… thalía poster and pictures of this guy called rafaello with a mullet and a bow tie. red saloon doors, red chairs. the windows are barred with wrought-iron fish. a sad place, home to 12 o’clock drunkards. a guy comes up to us, his name is octavio, starts bragging about being a hustler and sleeping with his cousin and killing a man. he showed us the scars on his belly from when he was stabbed once. miss m danced to a doors song. octavio told me i look very fresita, that i probably got charged double for the beer. i said i got charged $15 for the beer like everyone else, that its one thing if people want to think i’m a fresita, but another if they want to think i’m an asshole. he seems smart. i felt sad for him. he said i’m cute, but not that cute. he said i could make some money there, like him. he was picking on this old queen with curly hair. miss m called him el niurka. el niurka offered us some of his pink goey drink in a cognac glass, a conejo, he said. el niurka told octavio he loved him. octavio told el niurka to keep his stinky breath away.

:: as far as i know, this is all that's left of el 33

catchup

apologize for deadtime. i'm pretty much done with masters work, so posting will be up-n-running again with usual frequency next week. i'll start with a generous sneakpeek of my AQUÍ project, an ongoing research on gentrification, failure and popculture in downton mexico city. phase A of the research is done. phase B might well have an online ramification. my borderlandia paper is due for mid july, so in august the english translation of my tidbits will begin appearing on the blog. thank you for your patience.

i leave you with an opening quote for AQUÍ:

"camp doen’t reverse things. it doesn’t argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. what it does is to offer a different -a supplementary- set of standards … (camp is) the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience… the whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious."

susan sontag, notes on camp