fish without faces: Michigan to Michoacán

I don’t know what happened with this summer.

I am still trying to work out the details, but between this conference and that road trip, this project and that week of jobbing in that other city, so much of the daylight I was sure I’d seen backlighting the calendar just a few months ago has been eclipsed. Denver, St. Louis, Columbus, Princeton, Coney Island, Las Vegas, Oceanside… Here’s an attempt to sort things, mostly in pictures.

But first, no pictures here of a week in Kansas City. Not of the WWI memorial. Not of the view from my 30-somethingth-floor room out over Hallmark headquarters and the children’s hospital. Not of any morning runs up and down the 40+ flight concrete hotel stairwell (agoraphobia? acrophilia?). And certainly none of the truly bizarre, cultish, warehouse-partitioned-with-blue-curtains-and-silence working conditions within the convention center, nor of the even more bizarre declaration chiseled 3 stories up at eye-level into the limestone façade of the massive building across the street:

“Commerce has made all winds her messengers. All climes her tributaries. All people her servants. Yet from the land she draws her sustenance and her strength.”

Absolutely chilling. Mostly in its explicit and halcyon confession of our implacable industrial condition. And that strange turn at “Yet?”

“The…, um, that ‘she’ has, and does. Hey! I think this is my stop.”

This, for me, calls to mind something that David Foster Wallace offered as a footnote to his essay “Consider the Lobster,” for Gourmet magazine:

“As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American.”

Anyway, I probably should have taken more pictures there. Some good food, great catching up with an old friend, and a couple spectacular summer storms like only the Midwest can bring.

But here are the pictures I did get.

Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals in the central courtyard of the Detroit Institute of Arts. For years I’ve wanted to see these, perched as they are way up on the border with Canada, where a giant maple leaf flies within view of the city, and they go halfsies on the summer firework show with Windsor, Ontario, across the river.

Rivera did these in 1932. Commissioned by Edsel Ford, he spent 3 months touring the auto plants and other factories doing hundreds of sketches and studies. At that moment, Detroit represented the largest and most technologically advanced industrial complex in the world. But it was also a city full of racism, gangsterism, and violent suppression of organized labor. Unemployment was at 25%, and the month Rivera got to town, there were thousands of people on hunger strike at one of Ford’s plants. The Great Depression. (I mention all this because, again, I have no pictures here. Because this didn’t get painted. Because it complicated Rivera’s communist, industrial-utopian vision of what was happening in the world. As well as his commission.) Still, some absolutely breathtaking frescoes in the early industrial sublime.

Frida and Diego on West Canfield St., Detroit

Jack White’s 3^rd Man Records

Bayard Kurth shows us around Cass Corridor’s fantastic Ocelot Print Shop!

MNI WICONI - water is life

RECEDE IGNORE RECEDE IGNORE RECEDE IGNORE

Climate Justice prints & Ocelot's incinerator show

Justice requires that we eradicate desperate poverty before we tolerate indecent luxury.

What we do to the mountain we do to ourselves.

Garrett MacLean took a job doing some wedding photos, not realizing that condescending ruin porn was what the couple had in mind. New audience.

ghetto pail kids

Astounding 9-year Mesoamerica Resiste print project from Beehive Design Collective!

capitalismo y pan bimbo detail

León Felipe contemplates a concrete water weenie at the Casa del Lago, Chapultepec Forest, CDMX

María José de la Macorra's "Derrumbadero lacustre" at Casa del Lago

Dulce Chacón’s ink paintings

Diego Rivera's “Man at the Crossroads,” Palacio de Bellas Artes, CDMX. (Recreated a year after the original, commissioned for NYC’s Rockefeller Center, and then destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller when surprises like a Soviet May Day parade and Vladimir Lenin started showing up in it.)

Rivera's "Agua, el origen de la vida" (Water, Source of Life) (1952), in the Cárcamo de Dolores; (+ Fuente de Tlaloc & water organ!), Chapultepec Park, CDMX

Nezahualcóyotl Fountain (under reconstructions), Chapultepec Park, CDMX

“Hydrology thus restores the premodern sense of the lacustrine city, captured in the Náhuatl place name “Mexico,” which is commonly believed to be derived from the words meztli (moon), xictli (navel), and co (place): moon because of the shape and reflective qualities of the Lake Texcoco as well as the resemblance of the configuration of the region’s interlinked lakes as a whole to the “rabbit” shape of the moon’s craters; the navel, the position of Tenochtitlan’s island in the lakes’ and lunar rabbit’s center. In this toponym, there are no clear scalar divisions, the earth/moon becomes the navel of the lake/sky.

“On the other hand, Mexico City’s flowing water dissolves chemicals, body excretions, and other substances, transferring them directly and indirectly (through crop irrigation, for example) into our own bodies, and it also catches up trash and debris within its flows, carrying them beyond their designated areas. The materiality of water thus disrupts the conceptual enclosures with which modernity has sought to abstract life from environment, and it reveals itself to have a being of its own that disrupts its instrumentalization as mere resource for human consumption.”

—Marc Anderson, “The Grounds of Crisis and Geopolitics of Depth: Mexico City in the Anthropocene,” Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America. (2016)

Mueso Rufino Tamayo

¡Pastelería Ideal!

axolotl mosaic mural at embarcadero Belem in Xochimilco

Chavez Lopez family woodworking shop, on the shores of Lago Pátzcuaro. (Last year they made a chair and some other furniture for Pope Francis.)

at La Mano Gráfica. Pátzcuaro, Michoacán

“Dicen que el bosque se extiende hasta el mar” by María Luisa Estrada Sánchez

from Alondra Alonso Alvarez’ #Mihuida print series

“La memoria y su frontera” by Alondra Alonso Alvarez

Axolotl mural at La Jacaranda Cultural, Pátzcuaro

“This altar of la Dolorosa is dedicated to all of the innocent victims of the so-called war on drugs and to the mothers of the disappeared. A country dominated by weapons is a country flooded in pain.”