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London and the shut out brilliant light of Jakarta, itself so Dickensian in its
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London and the shut out brilliant light of Jakarta, itself so Dickensian in itscontrasts. Great Expectations lasted me through Vancouver, San Francisco,Los Angeles, Santiago de Chile and…Mexico CityI arrive here at dusk. Or is it dusk? In fact the next day I discover in the paper that I have arrived on the worst day of the city’s environmental history, which is saying a great deal.. Even I notice that the atmosphere is a little polluted. (For I am like the Kevin Costner in Waterworld. Costner has gills, having adapted Darwinianly to the new conditions of the planet. Likewise I seem immune to extremes of exhaust, pollution. I really don’t notice it. Long time in cities pent, and willingly pent, enthusiastically pent and I seem to have made the same kind of adaptation.) All the same the worst ever day in Mexico (mainly because of the Guatamalan forest fires) made it bad indeed. A classic rattletrap drive in a stripped down green VW; time for the first post-flight cigarette; one for the driver too as we rocket, tilting like a bobsleigh, down the narrow expressway from the airport, the whole little cab a joyful turmoil of wind, cigarette ash, sparks, snatches of conversation. The sky is red and through this hazy rubescence rear up smog-shrouded silhouettes of buildings, odd, surely wrong profiles? pyramidal, triangular, bulbous; indeed not unlike my dreams. We jerk to a stop outside the hotel Plaza Florentina, a big honest, brutal slab of a hotel. The next day I walk massively around the city, beginning up the Paseo Reforma, shocked to see a toddler dressed up in the most sadly perfunctory little parrot outfit, dangling beak, little claws hoisted onto the shoulders of his brother (about 7) to beg from cars stationery at the traffic lights, pathos the more so because there were hardly any cars on this Sunday morning at eight o clock. Does no-one shout out at you here in this city? Here am I walking through the most crowded markets of the city . I might just as well have Rich Gringo written on my back. And not one voice raised to importune me in four days; no, just one and it was the wheedling whine of the US street hustler: “Hey man, where ya goin man? You wanna buy etc.” But this was the lone voice of a returned wetback. In the Zocalo another puzzler; the authenticity of folklore, of the folclorico. “Aztec” dancers. Or rather a reconstruction, as far as I could tell, of what Aztec music, dancing, ritual might have been like. The fact is it was absolutely thrilling; incense, dancing, feathered headdresses, drums, all glittering in the sun. If it wasn’t the real thing it is what the real thing ought to have been like. Participation ranged from the expert to the amateur, costume from the full Quetzacoatl to jeans and trainers; and (most significant) there didn’t seem to be any tourists there. I have often thought that the authenticity of any folkloric event was in inverse proportion to the number of cameras present at the event. Here, to my astonishment, there was not one to be seen. Whatever, (for why this obsession with authenticity anyway? And why am I here obsessing about it?) the experience was moving and disturbing; there was a gut wrenching response to these drums such as I have never experienced since hearing massed bateria in the Sambodromo at carnival in Rio; a sound that makes you feel almost sick with emotion. I made my way haphazardly to the Plaza Garibaldi and the sensational complex of markets beyond; I walked through a covered gallery of fibreglass and plaster brides with fulsome lashes and scary lips, lavishly hobbled in a profusion of synthetic ruffles and mantillas and petticoats and trains; a dreamily Freudian experience to saunter, lemon icecream in hand through corridors of expectantly immobile brides. Exhausted I get into a cab with a nice man listening to a radio talk about the importance of living calmly and at peace with oneself. “Ah, esto es cierto” he said beatifically as he battled his way at tremendous speed into a space surely smaller than his cab, joining the phalanx of VWs charioteering triumphantly down Reforma. My last day in Mexico City. Finally to Las Bellas Artes where I was struck with the most wonderful picture by Diego Rivera: EL HOMBRE CONTROLAR DEL UNIVERSO. Marxist science and philosophy, Hegelian destiny made graphic; I have never seen such an exciting envisionment of a political philosophy; it is enough to make one a Marxist-Leninist. Rivera and indeed all twentieth century Mexican painting gave me a sudden revelation. In the Museum of Modern Art I suddenly have a vision of what European art might have been if it had not, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century (with impressionism) or the first few decades of the twentieth (the formalist, abstract, and conceptual routes we know) been hijacked away from the representational. For here was an alternative art history that Europe might equally have had; representational art had been by no means exhausted by 1900. Here was how it could have continued. From the Bellas Artes up the Latino Americano Tower. The Sears Tower in Chicago is a meaningless experience, too much like the experience of flight. The Latino Americano Tower is firmly rooted in the ground, (or not so firmly, a fact you are reminded of in every lift by the notices that tell you what to do in the case of TEMBLOR.) The interior is of a pleasantly antiquated modernity. (and there is always a pathos in the once oh-so-modern.) From the observation floor Mexico City dwindles away in each direction apparently to the horizon. The glittering of the traffic down the EJE Central like a necklace, a special bronzy glitter that I think may come from the special light of a thousand tinted windscreens. As I look for a restaurant I am transfixed: The coolest car I have ever seen. A matt silver Chevrolet Impala heroically scuffed, spectacularly down on its uppers, its crumpled sagging bodywork all but trailing in the tarmac, insouciantly pumping out black exhaust at the red lights. Behind the tinted windscreen a glass bead rosary glitters and swings from the rearview mirror; behind the rosary side by side two of the dodgiest Zapata-esque moustaches imaginable. Here was one car you would not let your daughter ride in. The lights changed to green, and with the underpowered and tentative roar of a motorboat this epic heap slewed round the curb and with a fuck you plume of exhaust gunned uncertainly up the Eje Central. I turn down into the Centro Historico stopping for lunch at a restaurant run by a whole family of sweet plump women. I eat black beans, fritters, chicken and listen to a trio, accordeon, double bass, violin outside on the pavement. My lunch costs me $2. I go to the bookshop next door; its stock is almost entirely Marxist Leninist; the owner plays mambo records; real mambo, not chacha (which is mambo for gringos.) I then walk haphazardly through the Centro Historico and find myself in a square of printing shops. Under the trees at one end a group of lads in baseball caps have set up a band with primitive PA system. They play rock, lambada, cumbia. It is touching to see these boys go through the little vanities of the rock artist, the riffs, the air guitar gestures, the one two one twos into the mike in this little square with an audience, under the trees, of about twenty. What happiness to sit there and listen to the delicious queasy sinuosity of the lambada, the shuffle of the cumbia with the sun beating down in the heart of one of the biggest cities in the world. I leave and spend the afternoon (for I fly tomorrow) buying presents; lead soldiers, a skeleton for my son, little quilted jewel boxes, plaster religious statuettes. I drink a big goblet of orange juice under an awning in the street which has been swamped by a concentration of armed and armoured police ringing some building of importance. My fellow juice drinker is Judge Dredd, in full body armour and helmet. I am slightly distracted from my drink by the fact that the muzzle of his sub machine gun is knocking against my knee. Back to the hotel to conclude a perfect day in the Piano Bar Chato de Londres drinking tequila. 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