i'm home

burnout

sentimental

How do we distinguish the historic from the sentimental?

left

So little is left of so many things.

modern mexico city, 1942

From James A. Fitzpatrick's "Traveltalks: The Voice of the Globe".

Via @andreslajous.

taxi!

One of the things that really made me depressed when I was back in Mexico City for Christmas was the new designated color code for taxi cabs. Who came up with the hideous burgundy-gold combo? And what's with the gay Angel de la Independencia logo stenciled on the side?

The neon-green VW bugs that had become proper icons of DF shall be missed. If they had to redo the look of cabs, why not return to the unquestionably fabulous "cocodrilos" of yore?

home for the holidays

mexican modern archicheese

You have to be Mexican or at least hablar español to get a sense of the full-cheese wonder in this, but just the soundtrack might give you an idea. It's shocking to see how ghetto Mexican Modernity looked back in 1994. I wonder if these were shot before the crash.

tragedy

Photo by Jaime Martínez

How is Mexico City different from other oceanic spaces? Amid the steam of tamale stalls, the smell of epazote, and the cries of street vendors, there's a sense of deferred tragedy, our preferred strategy for coping with chaos.

Juan Villoro, "The Metro".

suburban aesthetics

House in El Pedregal (1951). Photo by Eliot Elisofon

Despite the historical persistence and consistency of critiques such as these, mocking uniformity, sneering at shoddy construction, and decrying the absence of taste (or worse), a substantive history of suburban aesthetics—the criteria according to which society has judged the design and appearance of suburban dwellings and landscapes—remains to be written.

John Archer, "Suburban Aesthetics is Not an Oxymoron"

wonder

Mario Pani, Sketch for the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Plaza of the Three Cultures) project

Tlatelolco, Mexico City (ca. 1961)

I often wonder about the relationship between modernization and distortion.

thriller

Contemporary participatory urbanism in Mexico City.



I can only think of Heriberto Yepez's affirmation:

"Mexico, a culture that now floats on nothing."

torre reforma

Why do we despise certain buildings? Because they are poorly designed? Obnoxiously scaled? Due to their violent disregard for their surroundings? Maybe just because they've displaced older, possibly more valuable or endearing buildings for the sake of progress (oh the tired and lame excuse)? What about all of the above?


Not content with shutting down the most spectacular, most massive and glitziest gay club in Mexico City (five years ago my bf and I kissed for the very first time in the earlier location of the very same club in the Colonia Roma) the realtors and developers behind the Torre Reforma have stripped the city of another little piece of history and spirit.


And all for what? Well, to build the tallest building (oh the even more tired and lame excuse) in (drumroll)... Latin America! Woo-f*ckin'-hoo.



Ta-da! The Torre Reforma, to be completed in 2011

If you think the hulky horror is ugly on top, wait till you see the bottom!



Cataloged building under the Torre Reforma. The XIXth-century casona was the former home of the Living Reforma gay club.

This is historic preservation, Mexico City style.

Oh, and for all of those architects out there cheering this feat of humbug modernity, just so you know, they didn't only tear down the parking lot nextdoor to build the thing. They also threw in a little 1940's Luis Barragán apartment building, just for the fun of it.



Luis Barragán, Rio Elba 56 apartment building, now demolished. Photo by thom's'

modern mexico

Image results for "Mexico" and "Modern" in Life magazine



The town of New Guerrero being constructed, showing the modern, ranch style houses, 1953



Double decker bus on modern highway from Cuernavaca to Mexico City, 1958



A modern Mayan youth, 1947



Modern food market named `Mercado de La Merced', 1958



Modern store in Mexico City, 1958



Excellent picture of the "New Look" of the city showing modern office buildings, 1958



Modern sculpture at the Mexican Art Exhibit, Paris, 1952



Seen from top of modern building whose roof is playground for children, 1958



Polynesian restaurant "Mauna Loa" featuring pink flamingoes in sunken pit, 1958



Central Airport building where musicians entertain travelers, 1958

zona rosa

Some of you out there have been complaining that my posts are too long and nostalgic, so today I’m keeping it short and contempo.

According to the Real Academia, the word antro (derived from the Latin antrum and the Greek antron; a cavity or chamber) refers to:

1. A cavern, cave or grotto.
2. A place, establishment, residence, etc. of poor aspect or reputation.

The English equivalent of antro would be a dive or shithole. Mexico City has an entire neighborhood that is one big antro: the Zona Rosa.




Once it was posh and cosmopolitan, now it is gaudy and queer.

It’s a fallen neighborhood. Only the dated tourist guides still consider the area one of the city’s “main attractions.” Unless you’re into sex tourism, that is. The Zona Rosa's streets are full of huge, old German or Dutch men holding hands with skinny underage brown boys with their pants hanging down to their groins.

You might spot a scared, lost, straight gringo couple that had been here once in the seventies and wanted to relive the good ‘ol days. You feel bad for them.





The Pink Zone was originally called that because it was a soft and prissy version of a red light district. Nowadays it's gotten so seedy that people are actually calling it Zona Roja or Zonaja for short. (Sonaja means rattle in Spanish.) The Zona Rosa is Mexico City’s take on the zonas (tolerance zones, or “Boystowns”) that made Mexican bordertowns infamous in the 1920s. But gayer.

Today, the Zona Rosa is more pink as in splattered brains or insides.

Many of Mexico City's central neighborhoods have made a comeback and turned posh again after the 1985 post-earthquake exodus, but not the Zona Rosa.





The area is packed with shady teibols (table-dance clubs), merengue dance halls, gay clubs with Styrofoam cave-like interiors, Korean fast food joints, Korean hair salons, Korean Karaoke bars with Carpenters songs. There’s also a bunch of clubs without names or street numbers; backrooms for swingers parties, orgies, dress-code parties, show-and-tell parties, or whatever type of party you can think of.

The bars that do have a name are called Keops, Pussy, Boybar, Atenea, Lipstick, Crazy, Pink, Bgay, Shiva, Boots, Neon, Safari, and VIP.

It’s the only place in town where you can get contraband unfiltered Lucky Strikes.





The urban scale and the architecture of this gangrenous limb of the Colonia Juárez are fantastic. As one of the first modern, upper-class planned subdivisions of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the Zona Rosa boasts a surreal array of architectural styles: Neoclassical, Neo-Colonial, French Colonial, Mission (known as Estilo California in Mexico), Art Déco, Mexican Streamline, etc. In the later decades, International Style, Barraganesco, Bureaucratic Baroque (or Estilo Priísta Tardío), and Corporate Kitsch have been layered on top.

Until recently, the Zona Rosa was the only part of the city with exclusively pedestrian streets. But they were used more for cruising than walking.

Needless to say, I'm a fan.

stop suffering (from modernization)

As Mexico went from Third to First World and back throughout the 1990s, signs of the puffed-up success and subsequent failure of the latest wave of modernization sweeping the country (and the capital in particular) dotted the built landscape.

Early in that manic-depressive decade, the promises of neoliberalism were materialized in blue-hued mirrored glass and pink limestone. After remaining empty for years, The Hotel de México — a desarrollismo era icon-to-be turned massive structural carcass — was scheduled to reopen as a new WTC, complete with a Hilton and a J.C. Penny’s. Mini-skyscrapers and chain restaurants sprung up on lots left empty in the aftermath of the '85 earthquake, inner-city factories turned into Costcos, and the decadent movie theaters of my childhood, with their sticky floors and rat infestations and mid-movie intermissions, became proper multi-screen cineplexes with soda machine refills and self-service candy buffets stuffed with the once-exotic treats imported from the States (Nerds, Bubblegum Tape, Jelly Belly jelly beans... Stuff that in the old days you could only buy from black market peddlers squatting outside elementary schools). We were becoming modern, global, North American, gringos, and it was glorious.

Soon enough, the new life modernization injected turned Frankenstein on us.

In 1994, just as the signing of Nafta was supposed to crown the Mexican Neo-miracle, the irruption of the EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army, in case you didn’t know), growing political violence (including the slaying of the 70-year-rule official party’s presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio) and the peso crash of December all contributed to the country’s downgrade from neoliberal poster child to paradigm of distorted development.

As a consequence of the financial breakdown, prices soared, jobs were lost, construction halted and violence erupted like we had never seen: fingers, ears and other body fragments arrived by mail to families as proof that a loved one’s kidnappers weren’t kidding, drivers were randomly gunned down on traffic-jammed highways in broad daylight, taxis became deathtraps, glue-sniffing kids would knife you for a Casio. Everyone had an intimate quotidian violence tale to tell.

In the dreadful vertigo of those years, a wave of superstition and bogus spirituality arose in the city, eventually morphing into a millenarian, pseudo-religious revival (with its corresponding architecture).

Major TV networks were covering a series of bizarre attacks on livestock in different parts of the country and attributed them to the chupacabras, a demonic creature with tiger fangs and wolf fur and a rat’s face (and in a couple of eyewitness accounts, bat wings), making the most ridiculous of folktale monsters seem biologically plausible in comparison.

Top government intelligence agencies hired Francisca Zetina aka "La Paca", a fortune-teller and cult leader, to solve a string of political murders. The charade included a televised manhunt led by her visions. La Paca was arrested when it was discovered she had actually stolen and then planted the human remains that had supposedly "contacted" her and that the whole investigation was tainted.

Popular taste for the occult, nevertheless, kept being exploited. Morning shows had their own spook sections with ghostbuster expert panels and live reports from cemeteries and haunted houses. Saints that where believed to offer protection from being snatched or having your S.U.V stolen became especially popular among the well-to-do crowd. Soon enough, captors and carjackers found their own spiritual patrons.

The fact that social instability encourages deviant spiritualities and mystical upsurges that feed off turmoil is well-established. In Mexico City, during la crisis of the 1990s, these virulent impulses — triggered by fear, moral and material disruptions, and a sectarian mood set off by the crumbling political regime and the dissolution of corporate and traditionalist social bonds — started seeping into everyday life.

Our dubious spiritual reawakening became more visible in a series of small and ephemeral urban events. One of most noted occurrences was the miraculous apparition of the Virgen del Metro, the Subway Virgin. The Hidalgo metro station became an instant pilgrimage destination in 1997 after a water leak drew a familiar shape on the floor in one of its corridors. The stain was taken for the Virgin of Gualupe. People flocked around the stain and lit candles and kissed the floor, undisturbed by rush hour crowds squeezing into and out of trains. The floor tile had to be removed and encased in a glass altar. This led to a chain of replications across the city. There were reports of la Virgen showing up on tree-trunks and tortillas. I remember that in the same week, only a few blocks away from my parents’ house, a two-day roadblock was installed because La Virgen had appeared in the middle a narrow street, its dark silhouette etched onto the asphalt. Camera crews kept rolling in until a couple of teenagers that lived on the same block confessed to having drawn the Virgin themselves with motor oil.

Eventually, the shams gave way to more systematic and permanent imprints on the urban fabric.

One day, out of the blue, a handful of the city’s grand movie theaters of yore traded their crumbling marquees for billboards boasting a Valentine’s day blood-red heart with a white dove hovering over it, and a killer motto stamped in bold, blue lettering: Pare de sufrir, "stop suffering".

The billboards cried out to the battered and bruised inhabitants of the capital. At first no one knew what the hell they were. A stupid add campaign for low fat mayonnaise or sunglasses? A new telenovela or political party? The first Pare de sufrir sign I saw was draped over the entrance of the Teatro Silvia Pinal (see pop note below) an old government-owned theater I held dear ever since I saw my first-ever Broadway-style musical there: an adaptation of Cats. I first thought "Stop Suffering" might be a sequel to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I wasn’t that far-off.

It turned out that the theaters were bought and readapted by a South American
corporate sect that was still pretty obscure back then: the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG). The UCKG doesn’t only select theaters and large entertainment venues for their seating capacity: they are the perfect architectural choice — physically and symbolically — for mounting Christian consumerist extravaganzas with inspirational music powerful like a Menudo ballad, dead of night infomercials, golden Styrofoam thresholds, salvation cash deposits, Monday Godly Entrepreneurial Meetings and Saturday Hopeless Case and Love Therapies, and sales on selected items (holy water from the River Jordan, holy cloth from Jerusalem, middle-eastern Sharon roses, stones from the grave of Jesus Christ, miraculous oils from the olive trees of Gethsemane, etc).

Historically, the relationship between religion and modernity has been complicated and contradictory. At times religious beliefs have been fuel for change, at times the target of its assaults. Mexican Modernism (Modern Mexico in general) played this pull and push game repeatedly: it’s had a little bit of everything, from the Jacobin church demolitions of the Reforma wars to the soul-searching structural calculations of Felix Candela’s 1950s suburban chapels.

The curious thing about the more recent run-ins between modernizing and ritual tendencies in Mexico is that, at least as far as spatial phenomena go, these tendencies seem to be going in a direction opposite to what theory would dictate. The painful processes of becoming Modern — particularly painful when they go awry — have spurred a confusion of roles, strategies and spatial patterns. ¿Where are the Modern and the Traditional in a decrepit secular temple (movie theater) readapted as Church that has embraced the coarsest, most predatory features of consumer culture? Or when deaf-ear superstition actively colonizes the purest and most rational products of Modernity (mass transit)? More than a result of the eternal fight between Progress and the Primitive, these anomalous religious urban outbursts are symptoms of modernization looking for a way out of its own snares.

*photo by Flickr user manu

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

pop note

The theater was named after Silvia Pinal: Buñuel muse. Former wife and onstage partner of Enrique Guzmán (1960s teddybear hunk singer). Grandmother of naughty minor rockstar Stephanie Salas (who bore the firstborn child of the ultimate pop idol of the late twentieth century in Mexico; a blong Pedro Infante of sorts: Luis Miguel) and mother of naughty major popstar Alejandra Guzmán (the “Mexican Madonna"). Host and matriarch of the hit daytime television show, Mujer, casos de la vida real. The show has been running since ran from the mid-eighties to 2007, and but Pinal’s charm and face are as tight as ever. Mujer is an arresting staged-reality show with actors replaying the confidences sent via standard courier (maybe it’s e-mail now, not sure. I haven’t been able to watch in ages and apparently e-mail towards the end) by female (or, occasionally, transgender) viewers. Delivering one hour of none-stop tear-jerking bliss, the show deserves a post of its own. Maybe.

valle de los caídos

Don't you just love architectural timeliness, tact and critical awareness? Michel Rojkind, our (adult) contemporary bad-ass archi-genius/fallen pop-star drummer has announced a project — developed with Bjarke "big.dk" Ingels — for a new Museo Tamayo extension on the outskirts of Mexico City. Go against the flow, man, totally. Luckily for the gnarly dude, given the situation, the project might actually spark some interest. Not as another iconic whopper for the art world, but maybe as a Mexican Valle de los Caídos (de la Gripe Porcina). Powerful stuff.

solitary architectural pleasures

Some people are into feet. Others go for the frostier, decidedly unmeaty appeal of leather or latex. Moving it up a notch, certain individuals get off on brick and mortar (or steel, or glass, or concrete).

Is it really that strange that someone should fall in love with the Berlin Wall or want to
marry the Eiffel Tower? In this cold, cold world of ours, I have to confess that even I have sought solace in structures.

In my tender years, as prone to pseudo-poetic highs and tragicomedy as I was, and living in Mexico City, of all places — an untapped paradise for this sort of thing — I had my share of adolescent crushes on buildings.

I felt like rubbing up against the floating staircase in the Barragán House.

I fancied a ménage-a-trois with O'Gorman's pink-for-Diego and blue-for-Frida
house-studio (I was particularly drawn to the wonderfully phallic cactus fence).

Back then, few things in life made me happier than getting lost in the maze of downtrodden déco and futurist behemoths of the underrated streets of the Centro Histórico: López, Ayuntamiento, Dolores, Luis Moya...

All these fixations were fleeting and childish, though, compared to what a slightly tilted building on the corner of Jalisco and Revolución stirred in me. Juan Segura's Edificio Ermita has been the subject of many-a-fantasy and constant
reverie since I first laid eyes on it. Looming over Tacubaya, it's our own cut-back, depressed take on the billboard-skyscraper, "the Mexican Times Square," some say with a smirk.

O.K., so the Ermita is a wannabe. But this is exactly what makes it a symbol of Mexico City: its aspirational obsessiveness, a self-conscious dread of — and everyday struggle against — underdevelopment. Segura (1898-1989) conceived the building as a beacon of possibility, but today, swamped by 24hr chino cafés, "American-style" eateries with melamine tableware, dingy little dope-spot pocket-parks, black light basement dance clubs and markets where you can get a haircut and a cow-tongue taco from the same stand, it only stands as a stoic testament to things that never were.

The building is kind of schmaltzy, but overall breathtaking. Completed in 1931, it was one of the first skyscrapers in the city. Pictures of the Ermita from around the time it was built show the sleepy farmlands of the area, still largely undeveloped except for a few fin de siècle mansions and even fewer proto-industrial workshops. There's one with burros riding down Avenida Revolución (then Calvario Street). Even today the building feels out of scale. In a strange inversion of what would happen in a genuinely modernist city, instead of sparking a manic let's-see-who-has-the-biggest (uh, I mean tallest) -building construction blitz, the Ermita's presence seems to have inhibited vertical growth. Everything around it stayed flat. This flatness adds visual drama, it creates the effect of a sole survivor left standing after nuclear fallout or something, choking in the stewy afternoon smog. The Ermita is Mexico's own Genbaku Dome, a memorial to our first-round fall in a long fight for Modernidad.

Throughout the day, the grayish-pink Mexico City sunlight pierces through the building's central dome, filling the private interior court shared by neighbors and dressed scantly with tropical greenery. The building has a near-triangular base that fits snuggly on its 1,390 sqm corner site, with an original program that was quite unorthodox for Mexico at the time: shops on two of the outer facades, a large movie theater occupying most of the ground level, and various apartment types on the upper floors. Today, many of the apartments are empty (I don't know why; with their hardwood flooring, white walls, antique bathtubs, and double-height ceilings, I find them quite friggin gorgeous), the regal 1,500-seat movie theater was split into smaller screening rooms and is now abandoned, I think; and the shops have been downgraded to discount pharmacies and crappy dollar stores.

A nicer late addition to the building was the Galaxie dance club, which opened ca 2000 or 2001 if my memory doesn't fail me. Dark and kinky, with mirrored walls, zebra print sofas, tubular furniture, obscene lighting fixtures (huge translucent chandeliers shaped like mushrooms and sea-dollars), full of (early) modern-types, and named after one of the very, very few cars that make me drool, the Galaxie was a precursor of the D.F.'s now much-touted party scene, an already forgotten classic, I'd say. It was the kind of place where no one would blame you for believing that the nineties would have a comeback (there was a backroom dance floor in case you couldn't help yourself and had to relive the joys of M.C. Hammer, C&C Music Factory or Technotronic) and which offered rare nightlife wildlife sightings (Zemmoa as a boy, for example). It was one of the first clubs in Mexico with interiors by Emmanuel Picault, though I remember him complaining about the project being cut back and aesthetically unsuccessful overall. Diamond in the rough. I don't know if the Galaxie is still open, but I'm sure that — like everything else in this city — if it is, it's not what it used to be.

Back in the late-twenties and early-thirties, when Segura was working on the project for the Ermita, Mexican architecture was going through its own version of the late Secession-to-Disruption moment. Clashes were entrenched in architecture and aesthetics just as they were in politics. Almost a decade after the Revolution had officially ended, the route it would take as it settled down into Regime was still more or less up for grabs, and for that matter, so was the building agenda and the look it would claim as its own. These were the years of effervescence: of Creole Ulysseses and Cristeros and both Communist and Fascist conjures; but also of quests for True Modern Mexicanness, be it in the form of populist functionalism, neocolonial pastiche, Aztec Streamline and whatnot. (We'll be looking into all those later on.)

For his hardcore left-wing contemporaries (who in fact would later suffer a similar fate and fall from grace during the process of Revolutionary Institutionalization) Segura was more a Menshevik than a true revolucionario; a moderate, incorrigible bourgeois. Part of the dissing was fueled by his attention to ornamental detail: pale corridors with granite floors and fine wooden banisters ribbonned with
Zapotec-ish fretwork; fabulous Art Déco arched doorways and floral-shaped drains scattered on the floor and signed "Diego Rivera". (Rumor has it that the building skylight was originally a Rivera stained-glass dome that "mysteriously" disappeared.) Even today, critics rarely see Segura's work as true Mexican Modern, but rather dismiss it as a set of quaint "transition" architecture specimens. In the end, unlike many of its unabashedly "revolutionary" counterparts, which later degraded to officialist International Style, the architecture of Juan Segura has managed to keep a delightfully modern aura of wonder and surprise.

O.K., so this isn't hardcore proletarian construction. In fact it's a piece of pure middle-class confidence, the supposedly innocent and apolitical faith in slow and steady progress. In truth though, bourgeois aspirations of modernity in Mexico City during those years — particularly in terms of urbanization and of architectural prowess — were just as significant. (This bourgeois/middle-class illusion came down hard like the proletarian one, though not as quickly.) Besides, Mexico City, like any knowledgeable Mexican historian will tell you, has never really been a revolutionary capital. Revolution comes to Mexico City to culminate, to turn into something else, but it seemingly has a hard time sprouting from here.

But enough of these tidbidts; let me get back to the point of my archi-fetish.

The building took its name from an old chapel that originally occupied the site. The word ermita is Spanish for hermitage: a place of retreat, solitary detachment, confinement and reflection. (And whatever else those crazy old desert folk did throughout the centuries, all alone in their caves or their ashrams or the hideaway of their choice.)

The Ermita for me, for some reason, became an instant symbol of everything the future held. I fantasized of moving out of my parent's house and into one of the tiny 30 sqm apartments, ditching school and leaving my messy sex-life behind, taking up a more modest and more contemplative lifestyle, possibly working the night shift at the Café Shanghai to pay the rent. O.K. I didn't actually think I would quit the sex, but I would have more time to myself, in this perfect white-washed pod, in this perfect monster of a building, quietly overlooking the unstable mass of Mexico City.

It was never meant to be, of course, I've grown too old and too attached to leave everything for the Ermita. Just another pipe dream, permanently postponed. The building will probably still haunt me though — evoking all sorts of messy, complicated intensities in my chest — whenever I catch a quick glimpse of it, riding down Revolución.

*photo "Ermita in the rain" by mfandrich

incoming

News being fed to my screen constantly. Keeping track has never been this easy, or immediate, seriously. Still, I sense a great, big, deep, dark breach that the pixels and the connection speed don't fill. I think of my family, worry. I feel this emptiness even as I devour reports. Is it 20? 60? 81 deaths? I call. My dad seems calm even though two people have died already in the hospital he works at. My mom went to get her hair done on Friday since school was canceled. (She's a teacher. Google says 6 million + kids will be left without school till May 6. MAY 6). I can't believe it. She went out to get bangs or something. "Everyone down here seems pretty calm. We really don't know anything. It's scary, but what can you do?" Feeling of emptiness gets worse. My sister had her evening classes canceled but is still working her regular day shift. No school, no museums, no soccer matches, no concerts, no clubbing, no bars and restaurants, no Sunday mass. In Mexico City. No mass, no restaurants, no soccer; no Sunday. Troops being recalled from Narco War to help deal with public health crisis. "Situation under control." Yeah, right. Mayor goes on news to announce "no further flu-related deaths confirmed in the last..." What? Hour? Two? Even absolute connectedness can't break our good 'ole habit of media distortion, political manipulation and control. The mayor is announcing the news like it was one of the local government's achievements: X new streets paved! X school lunches delivered! No pig flu deaths today! (Church bells ringing here in Barcelona, we woke up to a surprise thunder storm this morning after killer sunshine over the weekend.) I think of my friends, of everyone I know. I check my emails and my RSS. Tons of posts on the subject of Mexico epidemic are already popping up. How do they do it? I can hardly think of what to say. Even super-smart, sensitive, engaged, posting-addicted bloggers that are THERE, LIVING IT are having a hard time coming to terms with the situation. (I'm thinking of you too.) Some of these tangentially-related posts just make me want to slap my f*cking laptop screen, make me feel like this whole global digital proximity is a big f*cking lie. Turning what is happening into instant easy-bake blogging. The epidemic as a source of future-dystopian architectural fantasy? Anti-flu furniture at the Fiera? Urban crisis as the ultimate on-line self-publicity stunt generator? Have we lost tact? Is this hunger for being on the crest of everything every single f*cking second making empty-headed infojunkies of us all? I thought TV was bad. Maybe this is worse. Look at me, I'm doing it too. Even as I complain, I'm doing it. (I was listening to M.I.A's "Bird Flu" a few weeks ago on my way to work. I thought it would be a wicked song for the opening hit-and-run sequence in some gritty post-pandemic after-apocalypse Danny Boyle action movie. A chase, of course. For whatever reason. The main man running away from something through narrow, Third-Worldish backstreets or metro station corridors. Wherever: Beijing, Bangkok Toronto, Mumbai, Mexico City.) I think of riding the metro in Mexico City. I think of the faces of people. I feel feverish. British Airways crew member tested for swine flu after visiting Mexico. School kids quarantined (was it quarantined or possibly quarantined? How many was it? 72?) in NY (or did I read New Zealand? I can't remember). 11 cases confirmed in U.S. WHO sets up camp in Mexico to follow the event. Dad has friend working at the CDC, says we can only wait or something like that. Wait. Read. Incoming. Emptiness.

pig flu

After my somewhat gloomy inaugural post I had a more upbeat and light-hearted one in the oven, but again, my hometown has turned the tables on me. This morning ALL schools in Mexico City (from kintergarden to university) were shut down on account of an apparently new strand of swine flu outbreak that has already taken at least 60 lives. The last time all schools closed here was, precisely, after the earthquake in 1985. Now I'm reading that the WHO is worried that the deaths could mark a pandemic. Are you kidding me? I hate fatalism, but this is scary sh*t.