Madrid @ November 2011
Almost 20* degree under a mild sun, that's Madrid.
Having a long conversation with my friend Vicente P., while enjoying the November sun in town, made my trip worth, indeed. Our live, basic issues of today and of many yesterdays, Vicente is wonderful.
Late afternoon, I went to the Cinema Palacio de La Prensa at Gran Via, the main consumption stream, watching "habemus papam" of Nanni Moretti. It was a catastrophy,Moretti should do TV shows.
Madrid @ November 2011
Madrid is beautiful.
Copenhagen @ October 2011
The Nordic of all Nordic towns, so close and so far from core land Europe, tough part of it, is a miniature.
It belongs to the very nature of miniature, that they develope a sort of solid and not reproducible own life, which transform them, away from originals they attempted primarily to imitate. On some precise stage of history they have nothing in common with the original. That seems to be the fate of Copenhagen.
Seen in its pure existence, as a place of urban space, the town is just a blurred copy of any ! nord German Town. The morbid charme of any ! Prussian town is imposed on Copenhagen and determines its image and its destiny. The frozen urban structure of towns build in protestants regions of Northern Europe in last four centuries and later as its blurred and obscene version, thus puritanism, in the US, are depressingly prevalent on any street of Copenhagan, on any public place and virulently on any geometric perspective.
Copenhagen is just the actual, nice, slim and effecient format of a urban space, wich is, in terms of urban developement, backed by the paradigms of the terrible past and more depressing present of any! town in North and East of Germany. Not merely the unbelivable visual "dryness" (C) and anti-picturesque emphasis of this place is a marker for its very structure in the real of urban living, but more then that, the lack of any! statement seems to be the strongest value it radiates. Copenhagen is saying nothing to you, just nothing.
While the local government is suggesting to the inhabitants and with more brand consciousness to the visitors and potential visitors that this is the future. Browsing the streets and places in loco makes you believe that THE suggested future of the ideal urban space and of the optimal eco friendly living style have never been and that it will never come to the realm of our sensory system, not here. One has to admitt that the ideology of the altertnative live style, the NORDIC one, with its huge conventional imagery plenty of bicycles, bicycle ways, bicycle products, and, naturally, with its claimed "Design Turn" (C) is just another nice branding idea for a place of 600000 people away from all main cultural roads in the reformated global village we live in. In this way, it is understandable why Copenhagen trys to transform and re-narrates its dry and distant face into a wild, innovative, sustainable, eco friendly, alternative, organic, design driven and NORDIC things. What they attempt to make us believe in a persistent and sucessful way, is to ignore/ to forget the trancendent core of this place, which is its inherent ultra-protestant emptyness. A virulent and infictive emptyness, or if you like it: a metaphysical VOID, that is evident and unavoidable in the very vibes of the urban architecture and in internal space of imagery, literature, cinema, art. It is even evident with an enforced rhythmic presence in the worst version of post-liberal ideology: local politics, be it left or right or green or red. As terrible, as its more perverse version of "protestant ethics" (cave: Max Weber & co) : namely the calvinistic ideology and its real materialisation, which is Switzerland; Copenhagen is the miniature of an utopian world of ideas, thus images and words: a dry and distant place, free of chaos, joy, warmth, movement and uncertainty.
Copenhagen is one of most liveable in all recent surveys.
It is a place for clarity of mind, brightness of spaces, organic food for a healthy body, bicycles as vehicles of ideology, design as escapism and a lot of fresh air. What do you need more?
Copenhagen @ October 2011
First of all and foremost is Cøbnhavn an illustration.
The Nordic of all Nordic towns, so close and so far from core land Europe, tough part of it, is a miniature.
It belongs to the very nature of miniature, that they develope a sort of solid and not reproducible own life, which transform them, away from originals they attempted primarily to imitate. On some precise stage of history they have nothing in common with the original. That seems to be the fate of Copenhagen.
Seen in its pure existence, as a place of urban space, the town is just a blurred copy of any ! nord German Town. The morbid charme of any ! Prussian town is imposed on Copenhagen and determines its image and its destiny. The frozen urban structure of towns build in protestants regions of Northern Europe in last four centuries and later as its blurred and obscene version, thus puritanism, in the US, are depressingly prevalent on any street of Copenhagan, on any public place and virulently on any geometric perspective.
Copenhagen is just the actual, nice, slim and effecient format of a urban space, wich is, in terms of urban developement, backed by the paradigms of the terrible past and more depressing present of any! town in North and East of Germany. Not merely the unbelivable visual "dryness" (C) and anti-picturesque emphasis of this place is a marker for its very structure in the real of urban living, but more then that, the lack of any! statement seems to be the strongest value it radiates. Copenhagen is saying nothing to you, just nothing.
While the local government is suggesting to the inhabitants and with more brand consciousness to the visitors and potential visitors that this is the future. Browsing the streets and places in loco makes you believe that THE suggested future of the ideal urban space and of the optimal eco friendly living style have never been and that it will never come to the realm of our sensory system, not here. One has to admitt that the ideology of the altertnative live style, the NORDIC one, with its huge conventional imagery plenty of bicycles, bicycle ways, bicycle products, and, naturally, with its claimed "Design Turn" (C) is just another nice branding idea for a place of 600000 people away from all main cultural roads in the reformated global village we live in. In this way, it is understandable why Copenhagen trys to transform and re-narrates its dry and distant face into a wild, innovative, sustainable, eco friendly, alternative, organic, design driven and NORDIC things. What they attempt to make us believe in a persistent and sucessful way, is to ignore/ to forget the trancendent core of this place, which is its inherent ultra-protestant emptyness. A virulent and infictive emptyness, or if you like it: a metaphysical VOID, that is evident and unavoidable in the very vibes of the urban architecture and in internal space of imagery, literature, cinema, art. It is even evident with an enforced rhythmic presence in the worst version of post-liberal ideology: local politics, be it left or right or green or red. As terrible, as its more perverse version of "protestant ethics" (cave: Max Weber & co) : namely the calvinistic ideology and its real materialisation, which is Switzerland; Copenhagen is the miniature of an utopian world of ideas, thus images and words: a dry and distant place, free of chaos, joy, warmth, movement and uncertainty.
Copenhagen is one of most liveable in all recent surveys.
It is a place for clarity of mind, brightness of spaces, organic food for a healthy body, bicycles as vehicles of ideology, design as escapism and a lot of fresh air. What do you need more?
Copenhagen @ October 2011
First of all and foremost is Cøbnhavn an illustration.
Istanbul @ October 2011
Soundtrack of MC:
Ben Harper
Bach
Xavier Naido
Liveablitity score (worse 1-5 best)
Sustainability: 2
Sociodiversity: 2
Public transport: 3
Creative Index: 2
Istanbul @ October 2011
The Biennial is located in one single venue, at the harbor. Compact and decisive. More photography than
Istanbul @ October 2011
After having passed the evidently endless sequences of REM phases bevor dawn, the following morning is beautiful: mild sun, still sea and people walking somewhere.
Although I see the sea through gaps between the buildings, it does not smell like sea, it is obvious another geography than the Caribeean sea.
Istanbul is neither Asian, and less then that, nor European. The standard media transmitted simulacrum claiming Istanbul might be THE geographico-cultural linkage between the two so different spheres of human civilization, between the notorious West and the blasphemic East, is to be forgotten and ignored due to the fact that the premises of this claim are false and, threor, obscene. Just starring at the strata of omnipresent local narratives and of preserved images boxes is not enough to trace te greatness of this place. History makes us blind by its borring and relentless focus on obvious "historical" events in the past and their factual and mental imagery of meaning. History makes us deaf by its shamless and iterative concentration on off voices of predecents and ancestors, who we do not understand at all. We, in order to be well mannered and highly educated, pretend to trace those events and see those images and, worse of all our simulative activities, to listen to voices of the past. We just can't. And it is unneccesary.
This town is a singular entity. A self made emerging place with a highly cultivated sense for ignoring the history and all histories, which should have been the time based ground of it or even space based legitimation of it. No. It is as it is, because it shuts its eyes close in front of the grandness of the BIG history of Byzanz, Konstantinopel, Konstantaniya and old Istanbul. Not even the old Istanbul has anything in common with this town. For a momment, in order to follow the sub-text, forget the geography, which always misleads us. Yes, logically Today is on the same place in wich was Yesterday, but in this case it is somewhere else. Istanbul would not have been Istanbul, as it is today in this configuration of urban dynamics, economic autonomy and chaos, cultural outburst and dissociation, if it would be merely a historical place. Beyond the "bullshit" (cave: book of HG Frankfurt and the disputes after its publication) of the local traditional politicians and cultural localists, who always claims to be the real voice of Istanbul and inherent of political affinity and historical loyalty for it, this town is not what they are talking about. It is not even their nightmare or chimera.
It is uniquelly something different that their narratives, images and Yesterdays.
It is the "After City".
PS
see Lars Lerups's text on after city, may be there is something in it.
Istanbul @ October 2011
A midnight landing seems like a nightmare: confusing, deliberating.
Soundtrack of MC:
Ben Harper
Bach
Xavier Naido
Liveablitity score (worse 1-5 best)
Sustainability: 2
Sociodiversity: 2
Public transport: 3
Creative Index: 2
Istanbul @ October 2011
The Biennial is located in one single venue, at the harbor. Compact and decisive. More photography than
Istanbul @ October 2011
After having passed the evidently endless sequences of REM phases bevor dawn, the following morning is beautiful: mild sun, still sea and people walking somewhere.
Although I see the sea through gaps between the buildings, it does not smell like sea, it is obvious another geography than the Caribeean sea.
Istanbul is neither Asian, and less then that, nor European. The standard media transmitted simulacrum claiming Istanbul might be THE geographico-cultural linkage between the two so different spheres of human civilization, between the notorious West and the blasphemic East, is to be forgotten and ignored due to the fact that the premises of this claim are false and, threor, obscene. Just starring at the strata of omnipresent local narratives and of preserved images boxes is not enough to trace te greatness of this place. History makes us blind by its borring and relentless focus on obvious "historical" events in the past and their factual and mental imagery of meaning. History makes us deaf by its shamless and iterative concentration on off voices of predecents and ancestors, who we do not understand at all. We, in order to be well mannered and highly educated, pretend to trace those events and see those images and, worse of all our simulative activities, to listen to voices of the past. We just can't. And it is unneccesary.
This town is a singular entity. A self made emerging place with a highly cultivated sense for ignoring the history and all histories, which should have been the time based ground of it or even space based legitimation of it. No. It is as it is, because it shuts its eyes close in front of the grandness of the BIG history of Byzanz, Konstantinopel, Konstantaniya and old Istanbul. Not even the old Istanbul has anything in common with this town. For a momment, in order to follow the sub-text, forget the geography, which always misleads us. Yes, logically Today is on the same place in wich was Yesterday, but in this case it is somewhere else. Istanbul would not have been Istanbul, as it is today in this configuration of urban dynamics, economic autonomy and chaos, cultural outburst and dissociation, if it would be merely a historical place. Beyond the "bullshit" (cave: book of HG Frankfurt and the disputes after its publication) of the local traditional politicians and cultural localists, who always claims to be the real voice of Istanbul and inherent of political affinity and historical loyalty for it, this town is not what they are talking about. It is not even their nightmare or chimera.
It is uniquelly something different that their narratives, images and Yesterdays.
It is the "After City".
PS
see Lars Lerups's text on after city, may be there is something in it.
Istanbul @ October 2011
A midnight landing seems like a nightmare: confusing, deliberating.
Bologna @ August 2011
A city of arcades and passages.
Pasta.
Genoa @ August 2011
The town of Enzo Piano and its shadow.
Pasta.
El mare @ August 2011
A day and a night in the depth of Mediterranean sea. Flying dolophins.
Barcelona @ July 2011
A pool on the roof, mild sun. That' s it.
Amsterdam @ July 2011
World Lung Cancer Conference.
A nice chat with my friend Martin v.R. in his beautiful house.
Prague @April 2011
Having a week off work I decided to move again to refresh the air. Prague was supposed to be the next stop: a kind of mueseum under the sky, as Paris is for years.
Mild evening, almost summer, a day before Karfreitag. Under the late evening light of lanterns, Prague seems to be Island of calmity, almost no traffic, no noise, the hills in background, that ' s it, why people love Prague. It is just an image: distant and safe.
Prague @ April 2011
First, Prague is oblivion.
A city of arcades and passages.
Pasta.
Genoa @ August 2011
The town of Enzo Piano and its shadow.
Pasta.
El mare @ August 2011
A day and a night in the depth of Mediterranean sea. Flying dolophins.
Barcelona @ July 2011
A pool on the roof, mild sun. That' s it.
Amsterdam @ July 2011
World Lung Cancer Conference.
A nice chat with my friend Martin v.R. in his beautiful house.
Prague @April 2011
Having a week off work I decided to move again to refresh the air. Prague was supposed to be the next stop: a kind of mueseum under the sky, as Paris is for years.
Mild evening, almost summer, a day before Karfreitag. Under the late evening light of lanterns, Prague seems to be Island of calmity, almost no traffic, no noise, the hills in background, that ' s it, why people love Prague. It is just an image: distant and safe.
Prague @ April 2011
First, Prague is oblivion.
London @April 2011
Saturday evening, surfing the tube toward the north of London, again the micro universe opend its ports: the tube experience.
For years, inevitably, I already used the tube within London for changing places and words and fragrances and spaces and subcultures and theorems and sounds and memories and prophecies and continents and tastes and images and deepness and openness. The tube has been my vehicle of transgression, even at the first glance absolutely not spectacular, but repetitive and, therefor, persistent, a way to come somewhere else. From Boomsburry to South Harrow, it is not a journey, it is, indeed, a shift of Weltanshauung.
Meeting the family of my oncle for dinner, it became obvious, I was travelling through places and times. He, at his end seventhies, may be less or may be more, immediately timeless, was as cool as ever. Clear visioned toward surrounding worlds ( cave: world with s), with a deep insight in our secrets we are not aware of them, relaxed in despite of time, living in many dimensions and as a person very nice and agreeable. Mr. Tayeb is convergence of pure awareness ot today, culminated histories, strange stories, adherent to the past, which is reality / illusions/ intensity. Witnessing early mornings of birth in those old times (in his case mine, and many other), days of joy and sadness, nights of nostalgia, the wind, and the breath. He is a kind of extension of our memories under the passionsless passing of times we experienced and inevitable transformations of places we lived in.
Saturday evening, surfing the tube toward the north of London, again the micro universe opend its ports: the tube experience.
For years, inevitably, I already used the tube within London for changing places and words and fragrances and spaces and subcultures and theorems and sounds and memories and prophecies and continents and tastes and images and deepness and openness. The tube has been my vehicle of transgression, even at the first glance absolutely not spectacular, but repetitive and, therefor, persistent, a way to come somewhere else. From Boomsburry to South Harrow, it is not a journey, it is, indeed, a shift of Weltanshauung.
Meeting the family of my oncle for dinner, it became obvious, I was travelling through places and times. He, at his end seventhies, may be less or may be more, immediately timeless, was as cool as ever. Clear visioned toward surrounding worlds ( cave: world with s), with a deep insight in our secrets we are not aware of them, relaxed in despite of time, living in many dimensions and as a person very nice and agreeable. Mr. Tayeb is convergence of pure awareness ot today, culminated histories, strange stories, adherent to the past, which is reality / illusions/ intensity. Witnessing early mornings of birth in those old times (in his case mine, and many other), days of joy and sadness, nights of nostalgia, the wind, and the breath. He is a kind of extension of our memories under the passionsless passing of times we experienced and inevitable transformations of places we lived in.
London @ April 201
At the backyard of the house a group of Indian people are laughing loud, together, rythmic and impulsive. The sun is shining.
On Saturday,while the sky was dry and bright, calm and without traces of regret, London was beautiful ( or biutiful, as Mexicans would say it).
I met my friend Javier G. I., who is attending a workshop on issues of climat change at Oxford University and now in London City, living in La Paz in Bolivia. First time met 1991 in a small pub in central Berlin or may be in an elevator in the building of National Library at Unter den Linden in Berlin or may be in our dreams, which already keep working, who knows.
Last time met almost twelf years ago in Bonn, during a spring day.
He was leaving Berlin 1995 after some years of stuying technological stuff at the Humboldt University of Berlin and mostly and predominantly having been on a seemingly endless wave of words, signs, sounds, images and joy. Our meeting in London at Soho Hotel was just a
"Wiedersehen" as if we talk regularly at some way, time is never a gap. We have seen each other after twelf years and kept talking exactly in the same mode as we did it mid ninethies in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg in Duncker Strasse or somewhere there. There was no incubation time necessary, no preparation, introduction or BlaBla, just starting to talk on those isssues, on wich we had have talked in those days.
At the backyard of the house a group of Indian people are laughing loud, together, rythmic and impulsive. The sun is shining.
On Saturday,while the sky was dry and bright, calm and without traces of regret, London was beautiful ( or biutiful, as Mexicans would say it).
I met my friend Javier G. I., who is attending a workshop on issues of climat change at Oxford University and now in London City, living in La Paz in Bolivia. First time met 1991 in a small pub in central Berlin or may be in an elevator in the building of National Library at Unter den Linden in Berlin or may be in our dreams, which already keep working, who knows.
Last time met almost twelf years ago in Bonn, during a spring day.
He was leaving Berlin 1995 after some years of stuying technological stuff at the Humboldt University of Berlin and mostly and predominantly having been on a seemingly endless wave of words, signs, sounds, images and joy. Our meeting in London at Soho Hotel was just a
"Wiedersehen" as if we talk regularly at some way, time is never a gap. We have seen each other after twelf years and kept talking exactly in the same mode as we did it mid ninethies in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg in Duncker Strasse or somewhere there. There was no incubation time necessary, no preparation, introduction or BlaBla, just starting to talk on those isssues, on wich we had have talked in those days.
Mexico City @ February 2011
Mexico City @ February 2011
MC has got all features of a megapolis. The vivid local cultures including contemporary arts as they are music, cinema and design seem to determine the new/old face of the town.
A paradoxical mix of accelerated urbanization by means of local area gentrification, absolute rise of service branches, huge amount of art hot spots, merchandizing, restaurants and the multinational coffee chop chains and proliferation of mass media and the most rapid growing realm of telecommunication tools, companies and innovations. At the same time MC tries to keep stand, to preserve historic monuments and documents with big efforts by the metropolitan area government in terms of having moments of de-acceleration, what might be useful for conservatives and elderlies and calming down the political aristocracy.
Mexico City @ January 2011
Day 2
A wonderful sunny Monday, let' s call it a normal Monday, where people go to work, please their live partners, send some flowers to the other beloved ones, and if free of action, than going to the town making errands, buying useless things, which look good, or even ugly in the eyes of those beloved ones, who get no flowers. This is a normal Monday. And not to forget, those kids, oppressed and pressured to go to their schools after this biutiful ( Mexican expression for Schönheit) weekend.
I tried to emulate the second version, namely, walking around in Centro Historico of MC, watching those who have been on the way from work to lunch or vice versa, those who have been talking to their selfs while walking with a tempered pace on streets and those who have been looking for some salvation in the absolute beauty of this town.
Centro historico seems to have two basically different faces. The One belongs to the visitors from outside, from Mexican countryside, amazed to the radical speechlessness of a fellow wandering and wondering in the city. These folks reinvent daily the town, they give to it a demonial face, a Fratze ( German word, indeed, see Bertolt Brecht or Heiner Müller) under the mild sun of early afternoon. I believe, just believe and nothing more, that this specific looking-at of paysannes in the city generally implies a dilemmatic background. On the one hand, a subtil curiosity about all those citoyens, all those "rich people" of the town, about their habits, their dreams and their pleasures. There is no sorrow of work, there is no pain of life in perception of men and women arriving just right now in town. On the other hand, a dark abyss of envy and get hatred. An evident, and not at all metaphorised, opponence to anything the town people say or do; think or desire. Looking in their eyes will miror you the dialectics. Then we encounter visitors from outside, overseas, mostly. I am not sure what visitors from other countries of Americas likely to be, when they exploring MC, we should, may by, just ask them. Visitors from transatlantic, mainely French, German or Italians might have other dialectics. They, I guess, would have loved having the entire glory, shine, beauty and petrified memories in their own places. They reinevent and keep reimagining "Ciudad de Mexico" as a theme park, as a neutralized, almost depressed (= de. pressed) and decompressed place, free and apart of the anthropologic filling and content. MC as a strategy, a fatal one. Images of European visitors are not concordant at all of those autochthon landpeople. The significant difference is a gap, a sulcus metahistoricus, between European perception of history, as a linear space of transformations of the outer world, made and rearranged mainly by Europeans and autochthon land based proletarians 's understanding of history as a disrutptive sequence of battles for autonomy and persistence power of town people, made possible by destiny, bishops, law and absence of god. European visitors, with their big, very big hearts, love Mexico, not really this very real place, this very real people, they love an image, a dramatic sequence of their own. They love a picture: induced by desires; rearranged by words, rebuilt by forgetness, restructured by visions.
Beyond fears and laughs of paysannes and European tourists, both are lovely, loveable, and nice, for sure, beyond their both paranoia and desires, Mexico City/ Ciuadad de Mexico is at Monday, at a normal Monday a biutiful place to be, pleasing the coolness of elderly women, dressed perfectly, walking in a manner, as if their were in deep dreams, touching walls of buildings built long long time ago, hunderts of years of solitude, built on bones and blood and heads and stories of former habitants by Spanish noble men and Spanish god' s men in the name of salvation and in the name Of Messias.
Mexico City, at Five of afternoon is a marvellous cacke with un Americano, looking at small kids selling things at the corner, feeling the impertinent presence of police anywhere, window shopping at Cinco Mayo, here and now, this town is at five of afternoon mild, slow and full of live, real live.
Soundtrack of MC:
Maria Callas (divine sound)
Element of Crime (german pop)
Benjamin Biolay (French SS/ pop)
Liveablitity score (worse 1-5 best)
Sustainability: 2
Sociodiversity: 1
Public transport: 3
Creative Index: 3
Benjamin Biolay (French SS/ pop)
Liveablitity score (worse 1-5 best)
Sustainability: 2
Sociodiversity: 1
Public transport: 3
Creative Index: 3
Mexico City @ February 2011
Beautiful celebration of a birthday with dottore Ignacio MR and friends, nice and smart people.
Mexico City @ February 2011
MC has got all features of a megapolis. The vivid local cultures including contemporary arts as they are music, cinema and design seem to determine the new/old face of the town.
A paradoxical mix of accelerated urbanization by means of local area gentrification, absolute rise of service branches, huge amount of art hot spots, merchandizing, restaurants and the multinational coffee chop chains and proliferation of mass media and the most rapid growing realm of telecommunication tools, companies and innovations. At the same time MC tries to keep stand, to preserve historic monuments and documents with big efforts by the metropolitan area government in terms of having moments of de-acceleration, what might be useful for conservatives and elderlies and calming down the political aristocracy.
Mexico City @ January 2011
Day 2
A wonderful sunny Monday, let' s call it a normal Monday, where people go to work, please their live partners, send some flowers to the other beloved ones, and if free of action, than going to the town making errands, buying useless things, which look good, or even ugly in the eyes of those beloved ones, who get no flowers. This is a normal Monday. And not to forget, those kids, oppressed and pressured to go to their schools after this biutiful ( Mexican expression for Schönheit) weekend.
I tried to emulate the second version, namely, walking around in Centro Historico of MC, watching those who have been on the way from work to lunch or vice versa, those who have been talking to their selfs while walking with a tempered pace on streets and those who have been looking for some salvation in the absolute beauty of this town.
Centro historico seems to have two basically different faces. The One belongs to the visitors from outside, from Mexican countryside, amazed to the radical speechlessness of a fellow wandering and wondering in the city. These folks reinvent daily the town, they give to it a demonial face, a Fratze ( German word, indeed, see Bertolt Brecht or Heiner Müller) under the mild sun of early afternoon. I believe, just believe and nothing more, that this specific looking-at of paysannes in the city generally implies a dilemmatic background. On the one hand, a subtil curiosity about all those citoyens, all those "rich people" of the town, about their habits, their dreams and their pleasures. There is no sorrow of work, there is no pain of life in perception of men and women arriving just right now in town. On the other hand, a dark abyss of envy and get hatred. An evident, and not at all metaphorised, opponence to anything the town people say or do; think or desire. Looking in their eyes will miror you the dialectics. Then we encounter visitors from outside, overseas, mostly. I am not sure what visitors from other countries of Americas likely to be, when they exploring MC, we should, may by, just ask them. Visitors from transatlantic, mainely French, German or Italians might have other dialectics. They, I guess, would have loved having the entire glory, shine, beauty and petrified memories in their own places. They reinevent and keep reimagining "Ciudad de Mexico" as a theme park, as a neutralized, almost depressed (= de. pressed) and decompressed place, free and apart of the anthropologic filling and content. MC as a strategy, a fatal one. Images of European visitors are not concordant at all of those autochthon landpeople. The significant difference is a gap, a sulcus metahistoricus, between European perception of history, as a linear space of transformations of the outer world, made and rearranged mainly by Europeans and autochthon land based proletarians 's understanding of history as a disrutptive sequence of battles for autonomy and persistence power of town people, made possible by destiny, bishops, law and absence of god. European visitors, with their big, very big hearts, love Mexico, not really this very real place, this very real people, they love an image, a dramatic sequence of their own. They love a picture: induced by desires; rearranged by words, rebuilt by forgetness, restructured by visions.
Beyond fears and laughs of paysannes and European tourists, both are lovely, loveable, and nice, for sure, beyond their both paranoia and desires, Mexico City/ Ciuadad de Mexico is at Monday, at a normal Monday a biutiful place to be, pleasing the coolness of elderly women, dressed perfectly, walking in a manner, as if their were in deep dreams, touching walls of buildings built long long time ago, hunderts of years of solitude, built on bones and blood and heads and stories of former habitants by Spanish noble men and Spanish god' s men in the name of salvation and in the name Of Messias.
Mexico City, at Five of afternoon is a marvellous cacke with un Americano, looking at small kids selling things at the corner, feeling the impertinent presence of police anywhere, window shopping at Cinco Mayo, here and now, this town is at five of afternoon mild, slow and full of live, real live.
Mexico City @ January 2011
A beautiful day, exploring some places without map and plans. The town has got a magic.
Mexico City @ January 2011
A beautiful day, exploring some places without map and plans. The town has got a magic.
Mexico City @ January 2011
The Sunday night dinner with Ignacio Reyes M. and Claudia Lorena A. was all about basic life issues, as they are finding a good restaurant with original and delicious food, checking out music playing there if it was by play back or in vivo etc. Finally we achieved both goals and stoped in a nice restaurant with a almost Japanese decoration out of wood and leather, decorated by a dimmed side light, but with the very original food. It was astonishing to see how my friend Igancio RM could convince Lorena to order a mixture of deferent components and to explain their essential taste arrangements to me. I had met him sven years ago in Berlin, whil he was undergoing a short period training in radiosurgery of brain lesions. He was actualy resident in another German city doing brain surgery. We met, by chance, almost at the end of his Berlin time. We did meet four of five time there, having some drinks and food. During following years we had some contact by email, not regularly, not always. Now I am here, after sending him a email at Friday deciding to go to MC. Sitting there, a day later, after all these years meant to me a lot. Interestingly by the way, we, both, had the feeling having met after some short time again. It was amazing. Food was good, non-alcoholic drnks better, what was unique was the easy, fluent, very funny and aggreable mode of our conversations. It was, as if nothing have changed in all years. His memories from Germany, vivid and detailled, told in a nice way, have been reminiscent to me for other places. A lot of stories, a lot of time passed. Lorena, a doctora de oftalmologia and oculoplastica, was a perfect conversationalist, she had some training in the US, loving long windy winters in Cleveland. Her deep insight into local histories has impressed me, indeed. While talking on the recent past of MC culture, events, we have been discussed issues concerning Spanish- Mexican and Spanish-South American relations, not in terms of politics, more easier and complicated at the same time, in terms of perception of each other's live, developements and expectations. I expressed my disappointment of the current changes in Spain, regarding the velocity of economic growth of the last 15 years there and the Lack of reciprocity in cultural changes. For me as a lover of Spanish poetry, reading Lorca since I am 14, of Spanish music, contemporary cinema and last but not least, and specially, of Spanish footbal ( Barca for ever), the disappointment seems even more bigger than I feared. The new Spain, all those people we meet somewhere, be it Berlin, London, New York or even in Spain itself, are somehow yet not as mature in terms of being non-pretensious, easy going cosmopolitism, approach to music, literature, arts and cinema, criticism on orthodox religious dogmas, criticism on generalisimo Franco.
I was amazed and happy seeing him again and her at first.
Mexico City @ January 2011
Day 1
Opening your eyes within absolute darkness of the night is always an astonishing, even often banal, experience. At 3 the world is supposed not to be ready for you and vice versa, in case you once went into the depth of your dreams. At 3 AM is a displaced external world, in my case today Mexico City (MC), even more astonishing to Open your eyes in front of a window, leading you in frame of an unique scenario of slowness and colors smoothly into the birth of the sun over the horizon.
MC has been appearing before my eyes, calm and noisless, embedded in forgetness.
Finally I tried to find out, what makes this place a moloch, as all mass media reports are continuosely making us to believe, what makes this place to gangster' s paradise, as any documentary is trying showing us a almost endless quantity of evidence. MC might the hell on hearth. What I have found, was multiple web sites narrating the mythical power of indigeneous godnesses, the meaning of sun, the archeology of sacrifice, the specific semantics of pyramides, and the radicality of reluctance toward the deadh, including a more radical conviction of life as a continuum. A dedicated museum to the Mexican ars moriendi in central MC is standing for this radicality, which we do not know at all in Europe. We do not know any form of transcendent radicality in old Europe any more, you remember the Night of bartholomae? Those days are gone irreversiblly.
Finally I was lost in multitudes of touristic nonsense sites, about charm of old markets, which are by the way neither old nor real markets, just fake for visitors.
Beyond statistics, this aversive format of knowledge, it is difficult picturing MC as an hell surrogate on the earth. So let ' s go out and look at/into the real.
The taxi driver took me to Izazaga finding a strange place called casa virreyes. Twenty something, wet hairs, sun glass, a cool guy. On the way, driving with a constant velocity of 80 kilometer per hour, bypassing all obstacles, as other cars really are, he was talking to me in the same tempo, in which he was driving, and in a biutiful ( the Mexican expression for Schönheit) accent, with the result that I did not understand a word, while listening to aweful mariachi songs attacking me from backside boxes.
It was a sunny, calm Sunday.
At Izazaga, a grey, sleepy building, open door policy, a more sleepy watchman listening to radio inside, as almost have seen here in MC: lost in his dark blue uniform in XL size and lots of emblames and codes and signs of his chest and arm. He did not have any reaction seeing me coming into the house. The hall, a step higher, had a visible cloud of dust in air, more imaginative than real, more scenic than touchable. Some isolated standing chairs and deep tables in room and a bar and computers in front of windows. Beyond the bar a young girl was sitting and looking at a screen, next to her, a teenage boy, 15 or 16 in age, reading a comic. The entire scenery seemed to be arranged, well choreographed, naturally, but for whom? After asking them for a room, they give me a key, requiring to go upstaires and to see the room, may be you don't like it, she said. I went to the 6th floor with the watchman, which was not willing to wake up, therefor wandering with me between his two dream sequences. I did not like the room, even it was the original copy of any motel room of any American movie of any adventurous pictorial narrative. No, I should go somewhere else. After asking the girl for a cab, to bring me away, I had to wait in the dustful hallway for 20 minutes, reading magazines on body building techniques from 2003 and on sailing and yachting from 2007, lying on tha marvelous tables. Some minutes later, two men came downstaires in the hallway, positioning themselfes on those marvelous chairs and opening their laptops. I believed, and I believe it even just right now, having seen one of these men in Paris at the airport CDG, waiting for the same flight, as I did there. A flight booked for AirFrance, expecting the AF menue of food and the menue of entertainement tools I was expecting to experience with AF, however, it turned out, that this flight AF 006 will be performed by AeroMexico. You know, what this means, well, a small Boeing airplane, with ZERO entertainement, and some food, amazingly with Italian withe wine. However, I recognized the man, opening now his laptop while sitting in the dusty hallway of casa virreyes. The other man, who obviously did not know him, was maybe ten years older than him, let' s say 65, did all same ritual- like movements with his laptops. I was just informing myself about body building arts and crafs in the beginning of this millinium and about yacht industry in Northern Europe, which mad me happy. Immediately, they started to talk to each other with a classical starter, which includes always the question, if the WiFi is working well with his PC?. Yes, it did work well. I, personnaly, was absolutely involved with all those biutiful bodies of 2003 and the color of their skins, so bronzed, amazing. The two men, assumingly 55 and 65 years old, speaking in American accent, seemed not having any reason to delay the process of exchange their solid, stable and consensuel informations on geopolitics. After stating, that his Economist subscription was an nice and useful idea, the younger one has asked the older one about his point of view on events happening in Northern Africa and Yemen. I mean, I was astonished, touched and perplexed, listening to two well educated American men, even the older seemed having a slight and almost unhearable Hungarian phonetics, which might change the entire choreography and arrangemnet of this very theatralic scene. Yes, said the one I believed having already met, with his laptop, in Paris airport CDG, the situation is out of joint, I don't really know, what will come, if the people on streets achieve some of their goals. He was worrying about the dark side of revolutions, obviously. Nobody really knows, what happens, if revolutinaries achieve their goals. Not even those, who are in action. The answer of the younger man, who was certainly deeply originated in American countryside, was more interesting than the general and correct statements of the first one, he said: that is not the issue here, Sir, as all good Americans are used to call folk they don' t know and don' t want to get to know, no Sir, the isssue is the following: do they understand what they want? He meant the revolutionaries in Northern Africa. I tell you, and believe me, I know what I am talking about, they have no clue. It is just rage, fury and poverty. Sir, I know, what is happening down there, nothing. They, he meant the outburst youth of Cairo, Tunis, have no idea of our system, of democracy. He keeped talking, down there there is no individual existing, nor individual freedom is the goal. Individuum does not exist there, so what they want at all? He was asking. My drive came in and called after Gregor Samsa.
At noon, I was arrived at Hotel New York, close to the monument of revolution and to the plaza de La republica, without aiming to be here. I just listen to the taxi driver, who could not find casa conde, where I had to go, at least I intended to go because of their nice artistic images of the homepage, so now I am in New York in MC.
At the afternoon, I was just browsing Paseo de La Reforma, an endless boulevard in central MC, build by emperor Maximilian for his wife' s promonades, thus just for fun and for eternal love of an emperor. Significantly, it is mentioned almost evreywhere, be it tourist guides, historical reviews and, I guess without being sure about it, even in the sayings of the people: the emperor Maximilian has had build a large, endless boulevard with statues, heros on horses, fontaines and biutiful trees just for love, nothing else than a love.
Sun, shadows, trees. A lot of bicycles on the boulevard Reforma.
Having a coffee in a small shop, tired and hopeless, I see a remarable sentence written on the bar : "te voy a quittar el sueño" , I mean so much for coffee, but OK.
It is a nice, calm Sunday afternoon.
I was picked up later by my dear friend Ignacio Reyes M. there and we were cruising through the many town barrios, being told some nice anectodes by him.
We made a short stop after a long car journey at his apartement in the very West/North part of MC, in front of "panteón civil de dolores", a marvelous view on fusion of nature and contemporary anesthetic architecture. A positive suburb with gated communities at the edge of the megapolis Mexico City, infiltrated by motorways, inhabited by powerful automobiles, a landscape with white stone buildings, park slots with a lot of Maserati and Porche and unbelievable solitude.
We picked up a friend of him by the American hospital and drove to downtown, while the mild sun of this biutiful Sunday afternoon was falling apart.
Day 1
Opening your eyes within absolute darkness of the night is always an astonishing, even often banal, experience. At 3 the world is supposed not to be ready for you and vice versa, in case you once went into the depth of your dreams. At 3 AM is a displaced external world, in my case today Mexico City (MC), even more astonishing to Open your eyes in front of a window, leading you in frame of an unique scenario of slowness and colors smoothly into the birth of the sun over the horizon.
MC has been appearing before my eyes, calm and noisless, embedded in forgetness.
Finally I tried to find out, what makes this place a moloch, as all mass media reports are continuosely making us to believe, what makes this place to gangster' s paradise, as any documentary is trying showing us a almost endless quantity of evidence. MC might the hell on hearth. What I have found, was multiple web sites narrating the mythical power of indigeneous godnesses, the meaning of sun, the archeology of sacrifice, the specific semantics of pyramides, and the radicality of reluctance toward the deadh, including a more radical conviction of life as a continuum. A dedicated museum to the Mexican ars moriendi in central MC is standing for this radicality, which we do not know at all in Europe. We do not know any form of transcendent radicality in old Europe any more, you remember the Night of bartholomae? Those days are gone irreversiblly.
Finally I was lost in multitudes of touristic nonsense sites, about charm of old markets, which are by the way neither old nor real markets, just fake for visitors.
Beyond statistics, this aversive format of knowledge, it is difficult picturing MC as an hell surrogate on the earth. So let ' s go out and look at/into the real.
The taxi driver took me to Izazaga finding a strange place called casa virreyes. Twenty something, wet hairs, sun glass, a cool guy. On the way, driving with a constant velocity of 80 kilometer per hour, bypassing all obstacles, as other cars really are, he was talking to me in the same tempo, in which he was driving, and in a biutiful ( the Mexican expression for Schönheit) accent, with the result that I did not understand a word, while listening to aweful mariachi songs attacking me from backside boxes.
It was a sunny, calm Sunday.
At Izazaga, a grey, sleepy building, open door policy, a more sleepy watchman listening to radio inside, as almost have seen here in MC: lost in his dark blue uniform in XL size and lots of emblames and codes and signs of his chest and arm. He did not have any reaction seeing me coming into the house. The hall, a step higher, had a visible cloud of dust in air, more imaginative than real, more scenic than touchable. Some isolated standing chairs and deep tables in room and a bar and computers in front of windows. Beyond the bar a young girl was sitting and looking at a screen, next to her, a teenage boy, 15 or 16 in age, reading a comic. The entire scenery seemed to be arranged, well choreographed, naturally, but for whom? After asking them for a room, they give me a key, requiring to go upstaires and to see the room, may be you don't like it, she said. I went to the 6th floor with the watchman, which was not willing to wake up, therefor wandering with me between his two dream sequences. I did not like the room, even it was the original copy of any motel room of any American movie of any adventurous pictorial narrative. No, I should go somewhere else. After asking the girl for a cab, to bring me away, I had to wait in the dustful hallway for 20 minutes, reading magazines on body building techniques from 2003 and on sailing and yachting from 2007, lying on tha marvelous tables. Some minutes later, two men came downstaires in the hallway, positioning themselfes on those marvelous chairs and opening their laptops. I believed, and I believe it even just right now, having seen one of these men in Paris at the airport CDG, waiting for the same flight, as I did there. A flight booked for AirFrance, expecting the AF menue of food and the menue of entertainement tools I was expecting to experience with AF, however, it turned out, that this flight AF 006 will be performed by AeroMexico. You know, what this means, well, a small Boeing airplane, with ZERO entertainement, and some food, amazingly with Italian withe wine. However, I recognized the man, opening now his laptop while sitting in the dusty hallway of casa virreyes. The other man, who obviously did not know him, was maybe ten years older than him, let' s say 65, did all same ritual- like movements with his laptops. I was just informing myself about body building arts and crafs in the beginning of this millinium and about yacht industry in Northern Europe, which mad me happy. Immediately, they started to talk to each other with a classical starter, which includes always the question, if the WiFi is working well with his PC?. Yes, it did work well. I, personnaly, was absolutely involved with all those biutiful bodies of 2003 and the color of their skins, so bronzed, amazing. The two men, assumingly 55 and 65 years old, speaking in American accent, seemed not having any reason to delay the process of exchange their solid, stable and consensuel informations on geopolitics. After stating, that his Economist subscription was an nice and useful idea, the younger one has asked the older one about his point of view on events happening in Northern Africa and Yemen. I mean, I was astonished, touched and perplexed, listening to two well educated American men, even the older seemed having a slight and almost unhearable Hungarian phonetics, which might change the entire choreography and arrangemnet of this very theatralic scene. Yes, said the one I believed having already met, with his laptop, in Paris airport CDG, the situation is out of joint, I don't really know, what will come, if the people on streets achieve some of their goals. He was worrying about the dark side of revolutions, obviously. Nobody really knows, what happens, if revolutinaries achieve their goals. Not even those, who are in action. The answer of the younger man, who was certainly deeply originated in American countryside, was more interesting than the general and correct statements of the first one, he said: that is not the issue here, Sir, as all good Americans are used to call folk they don' t know and don' t want to get to know, no Sir, the isssue is the following: do they understand what they want? He meant the revolutionaries in Northern Africa. I tell you, and believe me, I know what I am talking about, they have no clue. It is just rage, fury and poverty. Sir, I know, what is happening down there, nothing. They, he meant the outburst youth of Cairo, Tunis, have no idea of our system, of democracy. He keeped talking, down there there is no individual existing, nor individual freedom is the goal. Individuum does not exist there, so what they want at all? He was asking. My drive came in and called after Gregor Samsa.
At noon, I was arrived at Hotel New York, close to the monument of revolution and to the plaza de La republica, without aiming to be here. I just listen to the taxi driver, who could not find casa conde, where I had to go, at least I intended to go because of their nice artistic images of the homepage, so now I am in New York in MC.
At the afternoon, I was just browsing Paseo de La Reforma, an endless boulevard in central MC, build by emperor Maximilian for his wife' s promonades, thus just for fun and for eternal love of an emperor. Significantly, it is mentioned almost evreywhere, be it tourist guides, historical reviews and, I guess without being sure about it, even in the sayings of the people: the emperor Maximilian has had build a large, endless boulevard with statues, heros on horses, fontaines and biutiful trees just for love, nothing else than a love.
Sun, shadows, trees. A lot of bicycles on the boulevard Reforma.
Having a coffee in a small shop, tired and hopeless, I see a remarable sentence written on the bar : "te voy a quittar el sueño" , I mean so much for coffee, but OK.
It is a nice, calm Sunday afternoon.
I was picked up later by my dear friend Ignacio Reyes M. there and we were cruising through the many town barrios, being told some nice anectodes by him.
We made a short stop after a long car journey at his apartement in the very West/North part of MC, in front of "panteón civil de dolores", a marvelous view on fusion of nature and contemporary anesthetic architecture. A positive suburb with gated communities at the edge of the megapolis Mexico City, infiltrated by motorways, inhabited by powerful automobiles, a landscape with white stone buildings, park slots with a lot of Maserati and Porche and unbelievable solitude.
We picked up a friend of him by the American hospital and drove to downtown, while the mild sun of this biutiful Sunday afternoon was falling apart.
Mexico City @ Jan 2011
Night Nr. 1:
Having dinner with two friends under aristocratic roof of an old colonial hacienda in the south of town. It is Saturday evening, the patio enlighted and just the sound of water, men, mostly elderly, in absolute not-fashionable suites and ties, but biutiful ( the Mexican expression for Schönheit), slowly and calmly talking to their ladies. The ladies, mostly elderly, are wearing, as expected by us and by standards of social normative discourses, Haute couture, talking loud and are full of an pride, which, as it seems to me, belongs to the air of this hacienda. No gringos, no Frank Sinatra, who I love and who would totally fit to this space. Perfecting the atmosphere, a singer and three instrumentalists performing boleros: sin ti; remember the fabulous "Trio los Panchos" in 1960 or it was 1955 here in Mexico City, the recurrent dream of mine, or quizaz quizaz; listen again to the sexy accent of Nat King Cole in "in the mood for love" of Wang Kar-Wei, and the notorious noche de ronda; think on those days in Duncker13, breathing the greenness of the tree covering my windows.
Nothing else than this huge rush and virulence of memories, always present in images of my mind and never vanishing out of my sight, nothing else than the persistent echo of sounds, accompaning me during years and never fading away into the labyrinth of times; nothing else has got a substance, metaphysically and at its very essence physically, as these short moments
has had induced. Air, a glance, a voice, and the smell of chilli. This is, finally, the stuff, of which we are making our recurrent dreams. They are real.
While listening in vivo to bolero classics, while jocking on our live, remembering old times in Invalidenstrasse or Weinbergpark, suddenly a call for my friend Ignacio M.: a case with two shots in the head is waiting for him in ER, then, a race to the hospital, looking at CT scann images, OR for brain surgery.
Is that really the moloch? Yes, more real than the "Reality principle".
Night Nr. 1:
Having dinner with two friends under aristocratic roof of an old colonial hacienda in the south of town. It is Saturday evening, the patio enlighted and just the sound of water, men, mostly elderly, in absolute not-fashionable suites and ties, but biutiful ( the Mexican expression for Schönheit), slowly and calmly talking to their ladies. The ladies, mostly elderly, are wearing, as expected by us and by standards of social normative discourses, Haute couture, talking loud and are full of an pride, which, as it seems to me, belongs to the air of this hacienda. No gringos, no Frank Sinatra, who I love and who would totally fit to this space. Perfecting the atmosphere, a singer and three instrumentalists performing boleros: sin ti; remember the fabulous "Trio los Panchos" in 1960 or it was 1955 here in Mexico City, the recurrent dream of mine, or quizaz quizaz; listen again to the sexy accent of Nat King Cole in "in the mood for love" of Wang Kar-Wei, and the notorious noche de ronda; think on those days in Duncker13, breathing the greenness of the tree covering my windows.
Nothing else than this huge rush and virulence of memories, always present in images of my mind and never vanishing out of my sight, nothing else than the persistent echo of sounds, accompaning me during years and never fading away into the labyrinth of times; nothing else has got a substance, metaphysically and at its very essence physically, as these short moments
has had induced. Air, a glance, a voice, and the smell of chilli. This is, finally, the stuff, of which we are making our recurrent dreams. They are real.
While listening in vivo to bolero classics, while jocking on our live, remembering old times in Invalidenstrasse or Weinbergpark, suddenly a call for my friend Ignacio M.: a case with two shots in the head is waiting for him in ER, then, a race to the hospital, looking at CT scann images, OR for brain surgery.
Is that really the moloch? Yes, more real than the "Reality principle".
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