Mexico City: Sonic Youth plays… with handicrafts?

Action
On our first day in Mexico City, we decided to wander around the downtown historic center. We planned on heading off to the west of the subway station first, but I was promptly lured away to the north by a row of street stands, and after a few minutes we found ourselves at the Centro de Artesenias La Ciudadela, a huge handicrafts market. The market was surprisingly devoid of tourists, but walking down the first aisle, we saw a tall awkward gringo with floppy blond hair in front of us. After a couple glances, Renate joked that he looked like Thurston Moore, lead singer of Sonic Youth. I laughed along.

Another hip young American was walking ahead as well, and as we passed him, I noticed a sticker on his shirt. It said “band”. I then remembered that a couple weeks ago I searched online for Mexico City concerts, and read that Sonic Youth was indeed playing in Mexico City at some point.

Could it be? Thurston Moore wandering through a handicrafts market in Mexico City with yours truly? We made multiple furtive glances at the Thurston fellow, and it indeed seemed to be him. Giddy with excitement, we followed the rockstars around and thought of incredibly clever ways to engage them in conversation. For example, saying “Hi.” Or maybe “Hello.” And so on.

Passing down the next aisle, Renate caught a glimpse of another gringo, this one looking suspiciously like Lee Ranaldo, guitarist for Sonic Youth. A couple minutes later, I saw Steve Shelley, drummer, and Jim O’Rourke, the newest band member. After combing the rest of market, we finally found Kim Gordon, the last member. How cute – Sonic Youth was on a band outing to the handicrafts market!

We trailed them for twenty minutes, with all the subtlety and suaveness of Inspector Gadget. I was too nervous to approach them, but Renate finally went for it. She approached Lee Ranaldo and asked if they were playing a show here. Lee told us that they were in fact playing with some random Mexican band that night. I tried to drag out the conversation by asking about their time in Mexico City, and Lee chatted with us for a bit about their tourist excursions. Granted, I would have preferred for him to talk with us about free backstage passes, but oh well. High from our rockstar encounter, Renate and I finally bid farewell and puttered off to see the rest of the city, or something…

Reflection
Wow. We just chatted with Sonic Youth at a random handicrafts market in Mexico City.

Question
Wasn’t that cool?

Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and Queretaro: Different Vibrant Colors

Action
In Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and Queretaro, we walked around and enjoyed the colors.



Zacatecas



Guanajuato



Queretaro

Reflection
A couple years ago I began to regularly wear brightly colored t-shirts. Besides the benefits for bicycle safety, I mainly switched because vibrant colors conveyed to me a sense of optimism, change, and possibility. Different vibrant colors side by side added an extra sense of diversity and somewhat subversive energy. Walking around the streets in Mexico, I felt that same energy from the diverse colors of the buildings, cars, and signs.

To me, displaying different vibrant colors not only provides personal energy, but also makes a subtle political statement. In the US and Canada at least, we are socialized to wear clothes of certain colors and live in buildings of certain colors. Businessmen and politicians wear dark suits with standard blue or red ties. Our houses are often red brick or white wood panels, or perhaps some shade of gray or brown. Sure, we could in theory wear bright orange shirts and live in lime green houses, just as we could in theory turn our businesses into cooperatives or switch all the television airwaves back to public control. But we don’t. Or alternately, if we can deviate from socialized norms of clothing and housing, perhaps we might find it easier to experiment in other ways as well.

Granted, this is likely all rather minor, but is it merely coincidental that the rainbow is a queer sign, or that orange and green are the colors of the leftist New Democratic Party in Canada?

Question
How do colors affect your thoughts and actions?

Guanajuato: It'll all work out

Action
We were sitting on a park bench in Guanajuato, Mexico, when Josh sighed
and said, "We're lucky that everything has worked out so far. I wonder
what will happen when things don't work out." I murmered something in
agreement and we continued to look at the children playing and listened to
a the sounds of street performers. Suddenly, I blurted out, "What do you
mean 'everything has worked out so far'? I lost my eyeglasses, various
toiletries and retainer on the flight to Denver; I got motion sickness on
the bus ride from Denver to El Paso and puked twice; and we arrived in
Zacatecas (our first stop in México) at four thirty in the morning, which
was 5 hours earlier than we expected and we had no accomodations
reserved!"


Reflection
Actually, everything has worked out so far. I bought a cheap pair of
glasses to replace the ones I lost. I had even remembered to bring a copy
of my prescription. The nausea from my motion sickness passed after
walking around El Paso for a couple hours, and I've taken Dramamine before
all the long bus rides since then. Finally, though we arrived in
Zacatecas at 4:30 a.m., we ended up having a splendid day. We dosed in
the bus station for a couple hours and then took a bus downtown. The
tourist office downtown made arrangements for us to stay at a
nearby hotel. By 10 a.m. we checked into a hotel with clean, brightly
colored rooms and a beautiful view of the city from the rooftop. We
dropped off our luggage and after showering spent the late morning
wandering around Zacatecas and napped in the afternoon.


Question
What does it take to describe a situation as "not working out"?

Los Angeles and Zacatecas: The Joys of Unspectacular Sidewalks

Action
On our way down the West Coast US, we stopped in Los Angeles for several days. Despite warnings and previous knowledge about LA lifestyle, we were struck by the extreme dearth of streetlife. Even in the hip neighborhoods we visited, there were only as many people on the sidewalks as in the stripmall areas of Toronto or New York.

Two weeks later, we entered Mexico. In Zacatecas, the first city we stayed in, we were impressed by the opposite sensation – people hanging out on the sidewalks all over town, even when for no apparent reason.

outside Walt Disney concert hall in downtown LA	outside the Portal de Rosales hall in downtown Zacatecas
common sidewalk in downtown LA	common sidewalk in downtown Zacatecas

Reflection
There are certainly many reasons why the sidewalks of downtown LA (and many other US cities) would be less populated than the sidewalks of Zacatecas. US government taxes, subsidies, and regulation have favored the development of suburban retail stores and single-family houses while hiding the costs of car use, resulting in lower population density (fewer people to fill a given sidewalk) and less commercial activity downtown. Racial fears and prejudices keep many white people away from the inner city. Americans are socialized by the media and schools to live relatively private lives, in the comfort of our cars and homes. Factors such as these are likely present in Mexico as well, but seemingly to a lesser extent.

We were most interested, however, in something more simple – how the streetscapes were designed to encourage or discourage sidewalk use. In LA, sidewalks were often dominated by massive buildings with blank walls or windows, providing few opportunities for pedestrians to interact with their surroundings. Most buildings in Zacatecas were full of street-level doors, windows, and other openings, allowing people inside and outside of the buildings to interact. Sidewalks in LA had few places to sit, whereas in Zacatecas small ledges or steps were abundant, and well used.

Both cities boasted impressive architecture. In LA, the most celebrated architecture (such as the Walt Disney concert hall) seemed designed to create a spectacular image, to be observed individually and from afar. The theaters and statues of Zacatecas, on the other hand, not only offered an image, but also facilities for everyday human use. For example, the sidewalk ledge and dramatic lighting on the side of the Portal de Rosales gave teens a place to hang out in the evening. The steps and platform at the base of the statue allowed children to climb and a street vendor to display trinkets. Although small design features alone may not transform a sidewalk, they can certainly encourage more public social interaction, which can in turn lead to greater social understanding of different people and groups. And as Portland’s City Repair project has shown, even a small group of people can create these changes in their neighborhood.

Question
What other sidewalk features or designs can facilitate public social interaction?

Palo Alto: Too Much Information

Action
While I was in the Bay Area of California, I spent a day in Palo Alto, learning how to use a software program called Martus. A former supervisor of mine when I worked at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science and Human Rights Program helped develop Martus. Using Martus Human rights organizations can securely document human rights violations. The user creates bulletins describing interviews, violations or other actions and then chooses what portion of the bulletin should be public and what should be private. Bulletins are backed up on secure servers. The public sections can be searched by anyone including, researchers, students, prosecutors and the press. The private sections are encrypted and only the user who created the bulletin may read them. The program has a user-friendly interface based upon e-mail programs. Martus is free and open source, so users can examine it to ensure that it is as secure as it claims to be. As part of my training I learned the very basics of tagging information using XML programming so that it can be searched easily.

After my software training, I had dinner with my friend Josephine. I hadn’t seen her in four years: since we met at a youth hostel in Athens and then spent a day together in Paris. Josephine is a librarian with a passion for fashion. She plans to combine her love of organizing information and dishing about fashion in a grand website. Josephine commented that learning XML is now a standard part of the library sciences curriculum.

Reflection
Whenever I go into large libraries and bookstores (or surf the web for that matter), I’m overwhelmed by the amount of information out there. My day in Palo Alto reigned in some of that overwhelming feeling. While Martus is a program that adds more information to the Internet, I learned a little about how to organize and code that information so that it’s simple to pick out the relevant pieces that a researcher needs. The programmers who developed Martus are also working on developing a program to analyze the data. Once the data is analyzed, human rights activists have more empirical support in their claims of violations.

Talking with Josephine, an expert in information organization and retrieval, I felt like the mass of information out there is manageable. I don’t have to have read every book in the library, but I know there are resources available to me to find the books I do need. I also appreciated that trained librarians aren’t just masters of reference books, but also of electronic information.

Question
What difference does it make who produces the information and who creates the information retrieval methods?

Iowa City, Victoria, San Francisco: Herkys, Dolphins, and Hearts on Parade

Action

Iowa City erected 75 different statues of “Herky”, the University of Iowa mascot, across town. Each statue was commissioned by a different artist and designed according to a specific theme, such as Marilyn MonHerky, Galactic Herky, Coca-Cola Herky. An article in the Iowa City newspaper claimed that the collection of Herkys “furthers our identity as a fun, youth-friendly place to work, study and live…. It's something that adds color to our community; it's a nice respite from the hustle and bustle of our lives and troubles of the world. To that degree, the Herkys underscore our metro area's reputation as a friendly, vibrant community.”

In Victoria, British Columbia, similarly decorated dolphin statues appeared throughout downtown.


As we pulled into San Francisco, we saw a parade of individually decorated heart statues.

Reflection
The Herkys, dolphins, and hearts are not alone. The Cows on Parade promenades in Zurich (1998) and Chicago (1999) were perhaps the most influential launching pads for the recent craze of city-wide public art mascots:


Since then, the cows have incorporated and opened shop in other globally competitive metropolises. Meanwhile, some cities have attempted their own locally-flavored statue themes – fish in Baltimore, Pegasus in Dallas, pigs in Cincinnati, lizards in Orlando, and horses in Lexington. When I was living in Toronto, there were “Moose in the City”:


I support public art, in the same sense that I support art in museums. That is, I support art that expresses and inspires creativity, intrigues our senses, or challenges us to think about the world in different ways. In Iowa City, many of the Herkys were genuinely interesting works of art, and some even opened questions about societal or community issues. If local artists are able to design the statues and deviate from pop culture norms, the art could encourage social learning and interaction in everyday urban spaces.

At the same time, I'm critical of art that distracts us from societal conditions and people’s needs, conceals differences between people, or creates the illusion of a uniform “imagined community”. Reflecting on Toronto’s moose statues, a community health worker commented that "the whole part about attracting tourists to the city is fine, but what goes along with attracting tourists to this city is eradicating visible poverty -- all of the efforts that go into clearing homeless people off the street and making sure tourists' delicate sensibilities aren't offended by visible poverty," A city councilor added that "indulging in this sort of self-aggrandizement when we have all these chronic social problems demeans the city."

Question
How have city-wide theme statues worked in other cities? How can these statues create more equitable and democratic cities?