Silverlake Blvd.

Yesterday's 19th century civic pageant, performance art, and stadium rock spectacle

 

 

I confess to imagining that the Olympic opening ceremony should feature The Spice Girls, Rebekah Brooks, Damian Hirst, and the entire cast of the Harry Potter movies in a celebration o f
class war, malice, negativity
 and the exploitation of dead artists from Shakespeare to Amy Winehouse, in which every structure built in London before 1900 will be replaced with a luxury apartment complex, a Tesco, a Ladbrokes and a Tate annex. The whole to be directed by Guy Ritchie, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

 

But it turned out in reality to be almost as strange. I certainly didn’t expect it to include a tribute to the National Health Service, complete with glowing “NHS” logo visible from Mars. A lot of it was like that—the astonishing thing was not just the army of people swarming the field or the sets and costumes, but the fact that they were representing the transformation of rural England into the Industrial Age. Completely mad. Concluding with a forging of the ring, no less! Wagner and Tolkein must be seething with envy.

 

Both The Queen and Simon Rattle unbent their dignity for moments of welcome comic relief with Mr. Bond and Mr. Bean—two contemporary ideals of British manhood. Along with Beckham, Muhammad Ali, Daniel Barenboim, ….

 

The musical part of the show was hard to judge. Watching via NBC, most of it was submerged under inane presenter chatter. The playlist seems pretty strong, but the songs were presented in a rapid-fire montage of tiny iconic bits, like a drunk madly scrolling through their iPod. It was lively, but it hardly represented British accomplishments in pop music in the last 60 years (if that was the point).

 

The message was pretty clearly that Britain invented the modern world, both in terms of economic base—Industrialization to the Internet—but popular culture superstructure as well. Right. But I give them a lot of credit: where else would a sports extravaganza start with kids singing William Blake?

 

Jennifer Egan's Look At Me

 

Jennifer Egan’s Look At Me, from 2001, is well-written, cleverly composed, smart, entertaining and devastating.

 

I probably would have enjoyed it even if it had not been about Rockford, but that connection gave it horrified fascination. She’s done it. I can’t imagine a better depiction. Apparently her mom’s parents lived in Rockford and she used to visit them. It shows.

 

Not in the fake precision of the street and business names—which anybody with access to a map can fake—but in nailing the sense of dislocation, and the various forms that dislocation takes. We watch the model Charlotte recoil in horror and fascination at her long-abandoned home town. We watch another returned escapee, Moose, go mad over the town’s old claims to prominence and promise, now utterly extinguished, which he can’t help but read as an emblem of America and modernity. We watch the other, teenage Charlotte experiment with love and thought, only to rejoin her thoughtless but content friends. We watch Z studying the landscape and environment as an alien and enemy, trying to stare down its evil. We hear a bit from Charlotte’s dad, who has made his fortune by marketing the likes and dislikes of Rockfordians as faultless predictors of middle America’s tastes. Plus all the other carefully delineated characters, and their interactions.

 

She’s especially astute about the difficult relations between the natives who really escaped and those who returned. She even registers the beautiful guys, who, once in a great while, appear to lighten the gloom.

 

I can’t imagine the city fathers were very pleased. Who likes the site of your struggle getting turned into a symbol of American stupefaction and disillusion? It falls apart a bit through implausibility—there is too much coincidence, and it’s impossible to imagine all these exciting characters having a Rockford connection.

 

P. S. Egan has a terrific short story, "Black Box," posted on the NYer site.

Last of Mexico City

Home base: the Hotel Maria Cristina:

 

 

HMC was nice, except for the mysteriously missing floors:

 

 

 

On the plane in, I finished reading Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet, which is the soliloquy of a woman hiding in the Ladies Room at the university in 1968, as the army invades the campus to crush the student rebellion. It's hilarious and serious, and a much more engaging introduction to the town than Carlos Fuentes's annoyingly self-important epic Where the Air is Clear. And there's the university building, peeking behind the church, and the Pre-Columbian ruins.

 

 

“I climbed up to the only window in the bathroom and peered out. I saw a lone soldier far off in the distance. I saw the silhouette or the shadow of a tank, although on reflection I suspected that it might have been the shadow of a tree. It was like the portico of Latin literature or the portico of Greek literature. Ah, how I love Greek literature, from Sappho to George Seferis! I saw the wind sweeping through the university as if to savor the last of the daylight. And I knew what I had to do. I knew. I knew that I had to resist. So I sat down on the tiles of the women’s bathroom and, before the last rays of sunlight faded, read three more of Pedro Garfías’s poems, then shut the book and shut my eyes and said: Auxilio Lacouture, citizen of Uruguay, Latin American, poet and traveler, resist.”

 

North of Mexico City: Teotihuacán

The afternoon before, after wandering through the Museum of Anthropology, I decided that Pre-Columbian cultures were way too butch and way to Goth for me. This site, however, has a very different feel. A lot of what you see actually dates from the reconstruction effort of 1910, but that can't be the whole story. We had a spectacular day.

 

 

 

 

 

North of Mexico City: the Virgin of Guadalupe

This wasn't on my to-do list, but I'm so glad we went. I was expecting something like Flannery O’Connor’s description of Lourdes. Not at all. The kitsch vendors were mostly confined underground in the underground parking structure. At ground level, everything was tidy, clean and calm. The old churches were lovely. There were pleasant park-like gardens. And the new basilica was a marvel of thoughtful planning. You scoot along on a moving sidewalk in front of the shroud, below the altar. The architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez obviously had a gift for modernist grandeur (he also did the massive Museum of Anthropology).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mexico City: North of the Centro

Just a bit north of the historic center, around Garibaldi plaza, things get a bit funkier, but upholding, always, some dash and style:

 

 

This little baptistry (or whatever it was) in a tiny plaza demonstrates the city-wide crisis of squishy geological foundations.

 

 

At the Plaza of Santo Domingo one-man print shops work in the open-air, making invitations and business cards.

 

 

Even more amazing, are the scribes. Men and women sit under the arcade with electric typewriters, We saw one at work, carefully typing out a neat document as a client sitting next to him recited from a jumble of notes scribbled in blue ballpoint pen. A 2500-year-old tradition still alive.

 

 

At the municipal cathedral it started to rain, and the cathedral cat ran for shelter:

 

Mexico City: Coyoacán

Take the Metro line #3 (Dark green) towards Universidad, get off at the Viveros station, and you find yourself in a different world. A giant park and open plant market, colorful houses in a pleasantly suburban vibe. 

 

 

 

 

Of course two houses in particular are points of pilgrimage in Coyoacán:

 

 

 

Frida Kahlo's house was the first historic home I've ever wanted to live in: cheerful, hospitable, comfortable.  I'd move in tomorrow. It wasn't at all what I expected. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trotsky's house, just around the corner, is, in contrast, a pretty gloomy place. Not that living inside a fortress was much help in the end. Still, there's a nice garden:

 

 

 

The Museo Trotsky had a display of artifacts relating to Trotsky's widow,  Natalia Ivanovna Sedova, who lived till 1962, and apparently used the same McCalls patterns as my mother:

 

Mexico City: Centro Histórico glam

 

The Bellas Artes theater has an art deco interior that was worth the trip. Amazingly lavish and in perfect repair:

 

Plus an excellent bookstore (though there were excellent bookstores all over town, and in the streets):

 

Almost even more opulent was across the street, the post office:

 

 

Sanborn's restaurants are inescapable around town, but the original is one of a kind:

 

Across the street from Sanborn's was an extremely smart deco office building with no identifying signs. Any clues?

 

Desert Road Trip

When somebody takes the trouble to leave Worcester UK to visit Southern California, you need to explore some of the sights outside of L.A.

 

 

The new Marilyn monument in Palm Springs. At first we hated it, but after a while, it seemed more and more appropriate.

 

 

The sublime strangeness of Joshua Tree.

 

 

The Salton Sea. Now I actually have seen a place that is cursed by God.

 

 

Sid en route and at Joshua Tree. He's no fan of the heat. At some point he ate a pebble. But overall a very good sport, and just happy to be part of the trip.

 

 

 

The 4th

Trying out masks on the guys.

 

 

Hostess and guest flashing gang signs.

 

 

Fires.