I'm sad the post below is so close to the post above.  Pero así es la situación.  The closeness reflects reality.

When in Regiolandia, Do as the Regios Do: 32 Must See Hipster and Not-so-hipster Sites in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico

So, I know this is probably my hoakiest, corniest post ever but...I have been asked by several friends in Texas to give them tips on things to see in Monterrey. Or I have been asked, Is there anything to see in MTY? And after being asked these questions several times, I decided just to post these places on the blog so everyone would have access to the list.  

(First, I should mention a little about the beauty of Monterrey. I love it. Especially for Texans it is a breath of fresh air. Nine hours by bus or car, less by plane. Taxis, bars, cantinas, clubs, food, museums, clowns, bloqueos, history, culture, cerros, nature. And the city feels urban, not like most of Texas which simmers somewhere between rural and suburban everywhere including the cities. You don’t need a car to get around and people are, well, people. Yes, there is crime, a major drug war, trouble, but let’s not let centuries of stereotypes about Mexico get in the way of the fact that the city has beauty and much to offer. And after living in Monterrey a year and many, many visits, I have no bad stories to report. Knock on wood. Take that FoxNews. So yeah, if you live in Texas, you don’t need a lot of money to go: just hop on a bus or hop in your car or hop on VivaAerobus and get to Monterrey. And no, it is not exotic. Yes, it is a huge city, very industrial. So if you aren’t ready for this raucous, gritty city, then skip it and head to San Miguel de Allende or Cancún or Oaxaca. But if you are willing to deal with some obvious flaws, the joys are real.)

So here goes the list (in no particular order):

1.La Macroplaza – The most obvious destination with multiple statues, protests, old folks dancing, clowns performing, cheap massages y más y más.

2. La Huasteca - Sheer cliff faces, rockclimbing. The wind rushing through the canyons. Huge mountains of lightcolored rock. Like half an hour from the Centro.

3. Paseo Santa Lucia - The new riverwalk. Worth a long walk from the Macroplaza to the Parque Fundidora.  Monterrey trying to copy San Antonio, ah, crossborder imitation.  The best.

4. Pulga del Puente del Papa - Sprawling market under a looping bridge over the Río Santa Catarina just outside of the Centro. The bridge was built as a stage for the Pope when he came to Monterrey in 1979. And now this is one of the biggest flea markets in town, stocked with pirata everything, a varied assortment of junk, metal, shoes, antiques, gorditas, tacos, fresh fruit. Packed with viejos, colombianos, vatos, rucas, niños, un poco de todo.

5. Optician Row - Also just outside the Centro on Washington there is a huge number of optical stores with modern and vintage frames and decent prices.

6. Parque de Chipinque - Supposed to be beautiful nature and hiking and one of the best views of the city.  Never made it, cuz the supposedly free buses never came.

7. El Obispado - Old building from colonial period on hill.  Typical tourist site.

8. MARCO - Main contemporary arts museum in MTY on Macroplaza and near the Barrio Antiguo.  Rotating exhibits are usually mentally stimulating.

9. El Barrio Antiguo - Rustic cafes, funny stores, pumping club scene every weekend night.  Human waves of hipsters and clubbers and kids.

10. Garage - A laidback hipster club in the Barrio Antiguo with huge murals, an outdoor stage, an empty concrete vibe, falling apart but coming back.  Rocks.

11. Reforma - Old time drinking spot with woodpaneled walls and a rad waitress.  Writers and artists gather on Friday night specially.

12. El Jardín - Mala muerte gay bar in the wrong part of town.  Don't go and ruin it for the rest of us.

13. Queen or Parking - Cosmopolitan gay bars in the right part of the town.  Go to these.  That's fine.

14. Cafe Nuevo Brasil - Washington and Zaragoza. Decent breakfasts and soulful singing and poetry and medio mundillo literario.

15. Mercado Juárez - A huge old time market, dirty and packed, selling everything. The streets around the Mercado have fruit, meat, cheap food, used books, a unending parade of cheese, mandarins, junk, peppers and soap.

16. Metrorrey - The Metro. Ride it to Exposición Ganadera when there is a fair. Or just ride around and look at the cute young people with mullets, rattails, neon colors and more. Urban urban.

17. La Presa - Driving out the Carretera Nacional, the Presa is just outside the city. Worth checking out, getting elotes and checking out the tons of stores selling wood furniture and Mexican curios at the turnoff from the Carretera Nacional to go to the Presa. Oh, Presa means resevoir and it is like a big lake.

18. Villa de Santiago - Cute, quaint colonial town near the Presa and on the way to the Cola de Caballo waterfall.  Looks like straight out of a Mexican Golden Age flick.  The town fathers were probably going for that look.

19. Vegetarian food places - Superbom and Mei Wei Chinese Vegetarian (both near the Plaza Morelos, pedestrian zone).   Find the truth now.

20. Cola de Caballo - Horsetail Falls. Never been but it is supposed to be worth a trip. Everytime I try to go I end up getting sidetracked by other sites like La Presa, Santiago, caves, rivers and whatnot.

21. Pulga Río – Worth a trip for pirata movies and clothes and also the strangest sight: stalls selling gringo goods. Like in Texas, there are stalls selling Mexican products, here there are stalls selling gringo crap like Mac and Cheese, cleaning products and Pringles.

22. San Pedro – A smaller city connected to Monterrey (part of the metro area), San Pedro is the wealthiest city in Latin American. They say. Check out the central square, narco mansions, grass, trees and general upper classness.

23. Palacio de Hierro – Big mall on the way to San Pedro with some cool stores like British clothes store Pull And Bear. Good deals for Eurotrash clothes.

24. Plaza Morelos – The pedestrian area for walking and shopping and people watching.  Must see Timo's animals at least from the windows if you can't stomach the confined animals.

25. Café Iguana –  Rock/metal/caguamas in the Barrio Antiguo.

26. La Internacional –  Salsa and cumbia spot on Madero near Feliz U. Gomez.

27. El Alameda – Plaza. Lots of immigrants from other parts of Mexico strolling on Sundays.

28. Parque Fundidora - Big museums about steel and photography. A park built on land that used to be the main steel foundry in the city. Huge bike and walking paths, rent a bike, explore with your own killer bike club.

29. Cintermex - Hulking eighties convention center right next to the Parque Fundidora. International Book Fair in October.  Check it out.

30. Any street corner - Soak it in. You're in the third largest city in Mexico.

31. Farmacias Similares - Get your health care.  Doctor visit is 30 pesos.

32. Pirata markets near Juárez and Colón (Cuauhtemoc metro stop) - Buy your fútbol t-shirts, your pirata videos, locally produced porn, everything you could want or need.

Any questions or additions, feel free to comment.  

Ya tengo cámera de teléfono celular.  Ya sé.  Ya pueden disfrutar fotos como ésta.  
Bienvenidos al 2009.  Ah Houston.

Often it happens that in a community of no great distinction some fellow of superficial learning but great stupidity will seem to be rooted in the earth of the place the most solid figure imaginable impossible to remove him.

- William Carlos Williams, from Kora in Hell

My previous statements were made in haste.  I was hungry and confused, and I longed for purpose.  I wanted to seem like I was in the process of focusing in on something important.  I wanted to feel purpose rising like an acient city from the excavator's pick and shovel.  I wanted this so much that I rushed--I swung my pick wildly, and I brought a great delicate city to the dust it had always verged on.

- Joe Wenderoth, Letters to Wendy's

If you are seeking to find self-respect or a sense of your work's having dignity by turning to the American poetry scene, you are decidedly lost.

- Joe Wenderoth, from an interiew at RainTaxi

Kathy goes to Haiti. And takes us too.

So I just finished reading Kathy Goes to Haiti by Kathy Acker.  This is the real, true-to-life, 100% veridical story of Kathy Acker going to Haiti.  Just kidding.  Of course, this is no simple memoir to be trumpeted from the treeless mountaintops of Haiti as the truth of Kathy Acker's experience.  Rather Kathy gives us her own strange, strange image of the journey of a woman named Kathy from Port-au-Prince to Cap Haitien and back.  Along the way she is bothered non-stop by men who just want to sleep with her.  These encounters on the street, in cabs, on beaches, in hotels, bars and restaurants begin with a sexual proposition, then a quick refusal by Kathy, next insistence and usually ends in Kathy's agreement to play.  Bizarre interactions are the norm.  The book often seems to be like a Dick and Jane reader rewritten as a bizarre voyage of sex, colonial highjinks and drugs.  The prose is deceptively simple, lulling the reader into a kind of happy acceptance of the truth of it.  The reader follows Kathy step by step along her journey in Haiti from her arrival at the airport to the Cap and back to the capital.  This simple prose is fun fun fun to read in that it demands no special attention from the reader.  I haven't read all that much Kathy Acker: I started with a Best Of anthology and then went out and bought this book (which comes as a three novel set, so now I will read the other novels as well.)  What would Acker do with a character with her own name voyaging in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere?  Besides for several brief, eerie moments when the novel switches into a kind of psychotic first person, the narrator uses the third person practically the entire time.  Kathy does, Kathy sucks, she wants, she sees, she fucks, she is ready to leave.  In fact, the monotony of the sentence structure is profoundly unsettling after a while.  Kathy's reactions to situations and her interlocutors reactions continually lack emotional umph; it is as if everyone got very high and then walked around, hot and sweating and horny in the Haitian sun.  Kathy gets angry when she faces the privileges of the Haitian upper classes, but beyond talking about it being wrong, she does absolutely nothing about it.  Oh, and she has long, masochistic sexual encounters with a rich, drug-dealing Haitian guy.  The book is full of stereotypes of the worst kind, from the beginning to the end and these walking, talking stereotypes leave the reader wondering what exactly to think.  What becomes clear is that despite Kathy (the character obviously) thinking she is superior and removed from what is going on, the plotline and her own emotional dependency and fucked-up-edness exposes her involvement in the worst of the world's worst.  

Graphic taken from The Butane Group website.  They did a performance-theater piece that partially used Acker's novel as inspiration: Haiti (live and let die).

Nobody's Home, Not Even You or Me

So I am participating in the "Lost in Translation Reading Challenge" this year.  Basically, another blogger came up with the idea of calling on lit-bloggers to write six reviews of translated books on their blogs in 2009.  Then we post these reviews on our blogs and she reposts them on her Reading Challenge blog.  Sounds like a good idea.  So this is my first one:

Nobody's Home 
by Dubravka Ugresic

I love the title.  At first, I didn't even notice it, like I read the words without really taking time to read their full meaning.  But the wonderful experience of doing a double-take on the title happened to me.  A few essays into it, I closed the book and looked down at the title and realized the multiple meanings.  What a kid says when a person calls the house and asks for the parents and they are
n't home and the kid says "Nobody's Home."  Or what we could imagine a sign saying at a house that wanted a robber.  Or how we feel when we are left on hold for hours by a company's customer service specialists.  Or what we say about someone who just isn't all that bright.  And then finally, the big meaning: that in this postborder world where we all end up moving so much (or some of the us), as it turns out we all end up in a condition of not-being-at-home.  That, as another writer I admire pointed out recently, we all have multiple homes (place of birth, growing up, adulthood, parents' birth, ancestors' graves, etc.) and no home at all.

Dubravka Ugresic writes about all of these homes with an amazing ease.  As she moves across borders in Europe and the Americas, she casually leads the reader with her.  I never thought I would be deeply interested in Amsterdam, but Ugresic makes the city (her exile home) a symbol of all that the "First World" purports to be--efficient and welcoming and stultifying and soul-numbing.  She muses on cities, personalities, peoples' quirks, literary theory, political history, post-Communism in a way that never seems heavy or difficult.  She is kind to her readers (which might be due to the fact that most of these essays appeared originally in newspapers which need to attract readers and keep them and which pay Ugresic for her writing.)

Her musings on memoir are especially interesting, this cultish fad that threatens to make every life worthy of being recounted and that adds to the religion of celebrity the world is invaded with today in outlets from tabloid journalism to blogs to Facebook.  We are all celebrities, memoir would have us believe.  We all have a a story to tell.  Ugresic points out:

While most people around the world are barely surviving (starvation, wars, illness, poverty), and can do nothing but bite their tongues, a powerful minority is howling publicly about their misfortunes.

Ugresic writes about Wynonna Judd's recent memoir in which she purports to write "straight from the heart" and teach the reader some "life lessons."  As Ugresic points out, socialist textbooks insisted that the point of literature was to teach life lessons.  Ugresic has a keen ability to draw the eerie parallels between socialist screed and uber-capitalist products.  As she points out:

The problem is that the genre of memoir is registered as a literary genre, yet all its elements--intention, author, language, substance, interpretation, and reception--are edging over into
 the realm of religion.

Ugresic helped me to understand why I feel so uncomfortable with the public journalling element of blogging and with the explosion of memoir as a genre.  The ability to speak about one's personal life when so many people can't.  Obviously, I don't condemn people who write personal blogs or memoirs, but I do have a great discomfort with this idea that the text is the person is a lesson is a life is the truth revealed.  And yes, there also seems to be something profoundly religious about writing one's story down, i.e. as Ugresic points out: 

The prophetic messages are qualified as authentic if they are a) simple and coherent; b) truthful...; and c) in line with the accumulated wisdom of humanity..., in other words, compilatory.

In another section of the book, Ugresic writes about a strange scene of Vladimir Putin kissing a fish on national television and she uses it to talk about the contemporary hunger for the limelight.  

It was once considered vulgar and a sign of bad upbringing to speak of yourself, to tell the public about your private life, to cosy up to people you don't know, and to show undue interest in the private lives of others.  How did it happen that what used to be vulgar has become an essential part of daily life?

In the end, Ugresic ends up writing a lot of small details of her life of travel and bordercrossing, from rides on trains to her Amsterdam, from her travels in the US to taxi cab drivers in Moscow.  She writes about her very personal experiences of Tito's Yugoslavia (and the anti-fascist creation of that state) and Tudjman's ultra-nationalistic Croatia.  She writes about feminism in pre-"democratic" Yugoslavia and the Brittany Spears Girl Power Eve Ensler Vagina Power feminism of today.  Constantly writing about her self, she illuminates so much more.  Kind of an anti-memoir.  Her self-deprecatory, casual, fast-paced style draws the reader in without cheapening the prose.

Before I close, I should comment on the translation by Ellen Elias-Bursac.  Honestly, it was a pleasure to read the prose because it flowed in such a natural, clear way.  At times, I forgot the foreignness of the subject matter--Tito's Yugoslavia, Amsterdam's suburbs, Estonian tourism--because the tone lulled me into such easy reading.  Thanks.

A Bilingual Pun

Last night, a friend and I hit a number of art openings. One in Third Ward, then one in Montrose and ended up back at another on our side of town on Wayside. When we were done, he asked me if I wanted to head to another opening and I said, "No, ya me harté."

We both broke out laughing. 

More bilingual puns here.

When did reading blogs start giving me a subtle feeling of nostalgia?  Like a lost age on ice.  The long list of posts, the hidden comments, the monitored individual expression.   In a flash, looking at a blog seems so yesterday, so last year, so odd, so disconnected.  Like in a three or four decades, our kids or the kids in general will laugh at us for this outmoded form of communication.  Of that, there is no doubt.

Back Home


What was missed I guess.  The trees on Broadway are gray and leafless.  This is where the water pushed across the yard.  Walking around neighborhoods and each roof is missing shingles.  Many are blue from the loss of roof and the City's tarp donation program.  Cover your roof with a tarp!  For free!  And half of trees are everywhere.  Right.  Imagine the end of the hurricane.  Imagine it's still coming.   

Israel’s siege of Gaza, which began on November 5 with the blocking of food, medicine, fuel, animal feed, supplies, and other basic necessities to the Palestinian population, and which culminated on December 27 with the bombing and ground assaults that killed more than 510 people and injured as many as 2500 others, is the largest military action against Palestinians since 1967. Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza have killed 4 people in Israel.

When I think about all those who have died (like the five daughters of the Balousha family, Tahir Balousha, 17; Ikram Balousha, 14; Samar Balousha, 12; Dina Balousha, 8; and Jawaher Balousha, 4, all of whom were killed by an Israeli bomb that fell on the mosque next door to their house) I feel that our collective humanity is diminished. This war is a crime.

Read more of Laila Lalami's blog post here.  More info on the Balousha family is here.

In a bourgeois narrative the text is supposedly a mirror of that which is outside the text, so the reason that you identify with the character is that you believe the character goes in this mirror version of your life, and comes out with some bit of knowledge. This idea, which is basically impossible after Roland Barthes, is that you can know, that you can read a text, that you can learn something, that you can in a way possess knowledge: you are a centralized identity, and you as this centralized "I" are capable of knowing it. I mean it's based on Descartes. I don't live in that kind of world, so I would never go to a piece of art thinking that I can get a moral message from it, and that I'm in that much control. I think the real relations are very different.

and

We don't live in a culture where everyone has the same culture. When I teach a class, my students come in and I don't think there's one single book that I can pick that every student has read. We don't have a common culture anymore.

- From a rad interview with Kathy Acker before she died in 1997. Radical yes.  .

“Hay muchas líneas interesantes en la poesía norteamericana actual. Una de ellas es Flarf, en la que poetas como K. Silem Mohammad y Katia Degentesh hacen poemas con el lenguaje de búsquedas en Google (se le llama escultura google) para revelar las patologías del discurso contemporáneo. Otra línea es el nuevo minimalismo practicado por poetas como Graham Foust, Devin Johnston y Joe Massey. Estos poetas escriben poemas tensos, oblicuos que pueden ser descritos como líricos. Hay mujeres, tal vez inspiradas en la poeta canadiense Lisa Robertson, que escriben poemas post-feministas que son barrocos y excesivos y deliberadamente grotescos (vienen ahora mismo a la mente los nombres de Catherine Wagner, Lara Glenum y Sandra Lim). Y finalmente hay poetas como Juliana Spahr, Rodrigo Toscano y Ben Lerner, quienes escriben una poesía de agudo análisis político sin el carácter necesariamente paródico de Flarf. En cada uno de estos movimientos encuentro algo con lo que me relaciono o que me inspira”.

- De una entrevista de Rae Armentrout por crg.  Lee más aquí.

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RZKXPX - Sci Fi Soundtrack music from Monterrey, Mexico.