Monday, December 16, 2013

I moved to Mexico City in August 2012 and wrote these impressions soon afterwards.

Mexico City: Some Notes

   It’s one thing to visit a place and another to live there.  I had previously been only dimly aware of two Mexico City characteristics that became sharply obvious during the long, almost daily, walks I take in every which direction from the house I live in.  The first is a big nuisance: many of the city’s sidewalks resemble obstacle courses more than pedestrian thoroughfares.  Numerous hindrances are manmade, featuring hills and valleys—quite a few of them steep—deliberately created to accommodate garages and building entrances.  Others are the product of neglect: holes—including quite deep ones, some no doubt the result of earthquakes—protruding bricks and stones.  Even the nearby Avenida de los Insurgentes—the city’s longest street at 24 miles, stately, with formidable trees and trimmed greenery lining both sides and the middle aisle—exhibits largish patches of missing tiles as well as miscellaneous depressions.  If I had to be aware in Squirrel Hill of root-raised pieces of sidewalks walking here requires pretty constant attention to the ground beneath one’s feet.
   But not to the extent of blocking out the view above.  I know of no city—though admittedly my repertory is limited—that is as garnished with greenery as this one.  Trees are everywhere, many large and full.  Countless others are smaller and given shape by topiary techniques, some quite whimsical.  In many of the neighborhoods there is a profusion of hedges, on public land and private, almost uniformly carefully maintained; there are numerous walls wholly covered with leaves, sometimes to a height of twenty feet and more.  And while looking up one notices plants and flowers on scores of windowsills and ledges of nearly all buildings. 
   Appearance, the visual, matters here more than it does in most US cities, a fact that is reflected in the imaginative architecture, whether contemporary and high-rise or elderly and residential.  That also goes for dress.  The women striding along the Insurgentes are more fashionably clothed than those I recently observed on midtown Broadway: more colorful, more figure-enhancing; many successfully coping with shoes that are more likely to be seen on fashion pages than on Forbes Street or even on Broadway.
   Fashionable dress is less likely to be encountered at the Sunday afternoon concerts of the Sinfónica Nacional.  Jeans and sweaters are common; the love of music is pervasive.  But it was not until a visiting friend pointed out in astonishment did I realize how large a proportion of the Bellas Artes attendees was truly young.  Dating kids in their twenties, groups of young men in their thirties; no one near where I was sitting recently was over 45.  And when the Saint-Saens violin concerto came to an end, they all gave Paul Huang, all of 22, a rousing ovation.  And deservedly so: that guy is good!
   There are more museums in Mexico City, it is said, than in any other city on the globe.  One internet list of 128 is a bit padded, since it includes a series of specialized exhibits on university campuses.  However, the Lonely Planet list of the “21 most popular” is quite judicious.  While most visitors are likely to know of the great Anthropological Museum, the Tamayo Museum and Museum of Modern Art nearby, I want to mention three, the first of which is not listed among those “most popular.”
   Justifiably so, to be sure, since the Palacio Nacional isn’t a museum, but an immense government building taking up the east side of the Zócalo.  Nevertheless, its large number of remarkable Diego Rivera murals, the “Epic of the Mexican People” make it a Must See for anyone interested in that artist’s work.  The panels reward close study, since they exhibit not only superb aesthetic traits, but also subtle and not-so-subtle political messages, from compositions depicting pre-Hispanic scenes to the time of the series’ completion in 1935.
   From that grand palace to two modest buildings.  Long before Carlos Slim—most years listed as the richest man in the world—recently erected a formidably modern museum named for his late wife, Soumaya, he had established a Soumaya museum in a former factory building—not modernized, but tastefully neatened-up, as the kids put it—as one part of what is now a charming old-fashioned mall.  Not a great museum but a delightful one that exhibits somewhat randomly, numerous small castings of Rodin sculptures, a few of Degas, some paintings by Kahil Gibran (better known for his ever-best-selling book, The Prophet), 18th century Mexican portraits and an immensely long Tamayo canvas—among a cheerful miscellany.  Plans to stay an hour may stretch well past that.
   Another modest but deeply interesting “museum” is the home Leon Trotsky occupied in his Mexican exile until he was murdered with an ice pick by an agent of Stalin.  Not far from Frida Kahlo’s more luxurious home (Trotsky is said to have had an affair with her), the quite humble abode is left as it was when he was killed: pots and pans in the kitchen, typewriter, books, and glasses on a table and more.  All a far cry from Kremlin grandeur when Trotsky was the founder and first leader of the Red Army.

   The unpretentious garden may make one more thoughtful still.  Immediately visible is a plain oblong stone marking Trotsky’s grave, his name chiseled across the top and a larger hammer and sickle in the center.  We will never know what the course of history might have been, had Leon Trotsky won the struggle for Lenin’s mantle, perhaps placing Joseph Stalin’s name on that simple grave.

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