30.09.24

The gilded chapel of La Conchita en Coyoacan lies on the prostrate skeletal remains of the Nuevo Spaniards which in turn are layered atop a Toltec altar inlaid with Indigenous bone shards. The provenance of the gold compels us to keep searching.

29.09.24

You are prohibited from entering the park with pets, bicycles, skateboards and balls. In Frida's childhood park it is expected you will arrive tranquilo y lento.

28.09.24

The alleged site of Cortez's villa in Coyoacan where he lived with his Aztec mistress. Cortez the killer, the sailor, the builder of palaces on the graves of the conquered.
 

27.09.24

Comí churros todos las dias.

26.09.24

The librerio off the Alameda, perhaps the one where Bolaño 

stole many books:

"The first book to fall into my hands was a small volume by [the nineteenth

century erotic poet] Pierre Louÿs, with pages as thin as Bible paper, I can’t

remember now whether it was Aphrodite or Songs of Bilitis. I know that I

was sixteen and that for a while Louÿs became my guide. Then I stole books by

Max Beerbohm (The Happy Hypocrite), Champfleury, Samuel Pepys, the

Goncourt brothers, Alphonse Daudet, and Rulfo and Areola, Mexican writers

who at the time were still more or less practicing, and whom I might therefore

meet some morning on Avenida Niño Perdido, a teeming street that my maps

of Mexico City hide from me today, as if Niño Perdido could only have existed

in my imagination, or as if the street, with its underground stores and street

performers had really been lost, just as I got lost at the age of sixteen."

-     from Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches (1998-2003) 

 

25.09.24

Café La Habana, est. 1952. A crossroads where many of Mexico's finest thinkers and activistas met to drink café con leche and shots of brandy. Decades of poetry readings, shared meals, argument and the plotting of experimental and sometimes fanciful narratives, echoed in the mostly empty room. An optimum space to delve into a world of dead souls.

 

 24.09.24

An evening when chaos and kairos fused into elemental bedlam. 

23.09.24

Representations of an Aztec zocalo in miniature. The time and effort to position this intricate past is exceptional. Encased and eternal.

22.09.24

On occasion we bear witness to heroic architectural events such as this, the umbrellic awning of the Museo Nacional de Antropologio. 
 

21.09.24

Art deco - el mercado michoacan en la condesa. Parabolic bourgeoisie complete with hustlers and hopped up hipsters.

20.09.24

Ruins in contrast. The former city of Tenochtitlan is a short walk towards the Torre Latinoamerica which is noted for its ability to withstand severe seismic events such as the earthquake that devastated much of el ciudad on September 19th, 1985. The building defies gravitas yet has a tarnished and neglected outlook due in part to its status as heritage.

 

19.09.24

It is difficult to register. Gravity persists. The city centre of Ciudad de México is sinking as much as 50 cms per year in parts. Here the Aztecs built islands in the middle of Lake Texcoco by reinforcing mounds of soil and rubble with plants such as rushes and aquatic grasses. These islands afforded farmers growing space, and the rulers land to fabricate a stone universe. The Spanish, as is there practice, dismantled these temples and pyramids to construct their elaborate cathedrals nearby where photography continues to be prohibited. 

18.09.24

The centre of the Aztec Empire, in the centre of the Post-Colonial Empire of Late Capitalism. The fate of human endeavour lies in gravity, an attraction for the horizontal plane where all dreams linger like dank fog.

17.09.24

An impossible contortion in full anguish. Note the orbicular lens in the corner. Even in suffering such as this there is surveillance. 

16.09.24

Roberto Bolaño: "Reading is always more important that writing." A curious dualism. Difficult to parse, and yet one does require more courage, more thrust. 

The art nouveau glass ceiling of the Gran Hotel Ciudad De Mexico. 

 

15.09.24

To continue reading, Lispector's cronicas as a daily dérive into the ever-lucid mind and heart of a written life.

14.09.24

Roberto Bolaño, has been read and recommended repeatedly.
 

13.09.24

Pedro Páramo, to be read repeatedly.
 

12.09.24

Fernanda Melchor, to be read again.

 

11.09.24

Tilt-up walls resting on concrete footings, in situ. Assemblage appears precarious in these parts and yet proves consistently stable when seismically challenged. 

 

10.09.24

This bougainvillea, a favourite among psychogeography circles we travel in, erupts to provide shade and shelter from us argonauts. We are privileged to have it all to ourselves.

09.09.24

Our aerial tour continued onwards and over an immense factory of unknown fabrication. A vast montage of corrugation, offset geometry, and exhaust plumes. Of note a small chapel was nestled into the fencing to serve as a respite or pause for assurance. 

08.09.24

Each rooftop punctuates the journey, fully hidden from the street. Here school chairs lie as a precarious tangle of welded metal legs and plastic seats. The bare rebar protruding from the concrete pad like immense staples reaching skyward leave us wincing.

 

07.09.23

An urban alternative to the snow packed aerial universe of the resort. The dream is to shuttle workers along the periphery, gliding them aloft towards their factories, mills, and fabricators in a manner devoid of traffic congestion.
 

06.09.24

Kerouac rented a rooftop hovel at 212 Orizaba Street where he wrote much of his road novel, Tristessa. There was hunger, neglect, rot gut booze, aloneness, and an endless well of creative energy brindled with occasional despair. This tiny space where a typewriter sat on a downbeat wooden table. He didn't last long here, but in his suitcase Kerouac left with a novel, sketches for poems that would lead to Mexico City Blues, and a broken heart.

05.09.24

Tracking the Beats in Ciudad de México at this fountain with pool and graceful lines. Empty and divine in its tranquil setting, even now inspiring notions of the sublime.

"Left to right: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovksy, Gregory Corso and Lafcadio Orlovsky - Mexico City's Alameda Park, in front of the Neptune Fountain, about which the article quotes Kerouac from Tristessa "a magnificent fountain and pool in a green part at a round O-turn in residential splendid shape of stone and glass and old grills and scrolly worly lovely majesties." (from the Allen Ginsberg Project)

04.09.24

The day exhausts as we approach the inverted carapace of the gallery. As intriguing as the structure is the artworks are haphazardly arranged, densely displayed. The top floor houses dozens of Rodin sculptures better suited to leafy gardens in Paris, and yet the visit is worthwhile. 

 

03.09.24

A shelf dedicated to Roberto Bolaño's ficción en español. A rough journey through some of the more intensely colourfied areas of the city was required to reach the fifth floor of the biblioteca vasconcelos. Stunning. 

02.09.24

The UNAM chemistry building displaying periodic fenestrations. Elemental relief. 

01.09.24

Around the corner stands the majestic central library of the UNAM complete with Juan O'Gorman's mural depictions of The Historical Representation of Culture. Featured on the south wall is the colonial past. We read that the tiles were laid into small panels off site making for installation readiness.