I'm Cultured like Yakult, Sucka!

*Note, this post was written several weeks ago, in fact DURING the Argentina-Mexico game, which brought us all to the conclusion that that we needed was for Chicharito to make fewer damn sandwiches and play more damn soccer. ** --The Editor

In light of the iminent slaughter of the Mexican team by the Argentinians, I think I should direct the topic away from fútbol and toward, uh, other pursuits.

Now, onto more intellectual issues. A museum exposition that I saw semi-recently was "The Invisible World of René Magritte" at Bellas Artes. Maybe I haven't posted a photo yet of Bellas Artes' magnificent orange dome, but I shall do so soon. Regardless I have a photo of the facade, and of one of the amazing wooden sculptures in exhibition outside. These 12 giant wooden heads are supposed to be the Apostles. As far as I can tell each is carved from a single piece of wood, which is to say they used some big damn trees to make this project, which makes my inner environmentalist a little sad, especially knowing a bit about the state of Mexican logging policy ("Log the fuckers!!!!"). Oh well. It's also quite close to the Torre Latinoamericana, an impressive skyscraper with a big antenna on top. Furthermore, the electric buses pass right by on Eje Central/Lázaro Cárdenas. Their little antennae fall off all the time just like the SF buses. Ah, a little bit of home right here in Mexico City.

Okay, so the Bellas Artes building is cool for various reasons, the first and most obvious of which is the exterior architecture, very old-and-made-of-stone looking, big, impressive, with the dichoso orange dome. Secondly, it's another prime and excellent example of the amazing sinking soils described in one of my July posts from last year (holy goodness, I've been here very nearly one whole year!!), as the building is in a funny little well. Thirdly, lots of people hang around in its marbly plaza, and I might remind you that México DF is make-out city, so sometimes you have to observe more tonsil hockey than you'd really like. Fourthly, it's right next to the Alameda, the park in downtown that is the subject of an amazing Diego Rivera mural available for goggling in a nearby museum. Fifthly, the interior contains these amazing art-deco-mexica designs and luxurious period interior design.

The permanent exhibit consists of 2 floors of murals: my favourite is the Diego Rivera one which features a serious-looking Charles Darwin hanging with his homie the chimpanzee, as well as various communistic, scientific and artistic figures of the pre-WWII 20th century. Giant cells and such.

Now, Magritte. The art of course was wonderful, because it was absurd, smooth-textured, oddly soothing in that trippy wild kind of way. BUT the coolest part, aside from the detailed descriptions of the artist's social life and personal history, was the interactive absurdist-art section. It was mainly designed for kids but we overgrown kids found it quite delightful ourselves.

First it featured a shelving unit for mislabeling things (as Magritte enjoyed doing in his day...). It contained everyday objects with profound or ordinary words pasted on labels in front of them, with a kid-friendly explanation that you don't have to call something what it really is, but that you can also use it as a placeholder for another idea. Cool, right?

The next part had a desk full of magazines, with instructions on the wall to cut out words at random and make absurdist poetry. Past that there was a series of giant plywood cards with pieces of images on them: fish head, horse shoulders, lady chest, business-suit crotch, chicken knees, mermaid tail, etc. which you were supposed to use to create physical non-sequiturs on your own body (for the photographic enjoyment of your friends and strangers!). Then there were mirillas, little diorama-boxes built into the wall with the tiniest peephole to see the tiny universe within, sometimes a little figure, or a rock, or whatever. Then , the ginormous blackbord. whereon you were supposed to draw figures. Finally, there was the wall of birds: in the center of the room was a long table with colorful pieces of paper and pencils, with instructions to write and/or draw about a dream you once had and cut out the piece of paper into the shape of a bird, and stick it to the wall. It was pretty cool, seeing little kids' dreams all over the place. I can never remember my dreams so I cut out a bird shape (okay, a duck, really...) and handed it off to marcos, who commenced to draw cockroaches with eyes on their backs (a super cool image, which later he created realistically in photoshop...). This we stuck to the wall.

Now of course for the life update. I'm still working like a dog 6 days a week, trying to live it up on my half-weekends (boy do I feel robbed!) but it's all good. My colleagues are awesome and so are most of my students; today I had an interesting mixture of students: an 18-year-old Nepalese girl and an army liutenent (who's one of my favorite students because he's just so out of control-- he's freakin' hilarious, even in his half-English). I teach kids pretty much every day for at least an hour, and they use this book called All Aboard, which is a pretty cool series, actually. Most of the adults use the book "Interchange" which is a sort of general-purpose life-English, with lots of stupid dialogues and things. Then there's "Market Leader," a British book about business and shit like that. They give me a lot of those classes because they're really into the jive of "hey look at us we have a Gringa! Aren't we special?" But it's cool; most of those students are pretty advanced and there's sometimes cool readings and interviews to listen to; and I can find cool stuff on the internet to supplement the book's hella square attitude (like the other day when I gave one student a short reading on Grameen Bank and microloans, and to another I gave an article about Gross National Happiness... you know, things like that).

Meanwhile, the fowl are getting fowler, fatter, and more sexually dimorphous. I'm bummed to announce that El Morado is indeed going to be a rooster, which means probably eating him younger than I'd like... and that means deciding how I'm going to do the slaughter and fast (where the hell can I go that nobody will see me?? Yargh). The tomatos are tired of growing and although they're small I think I'm going to go ahead and let them flower, throw on some more of the old NPK and see what happens. Next post I'll go on with my special fish-waste/crushed-corn prepared feed which is going to go on hiatus due to the fact that it makes the apartment smell like ASS even though it saves me a bucket of money. Le sigh.

Ah, last bit, tying chamba together with hacienda: the school is offering a summer day-camp in which there are about ten kids who I spent my friday teaching to garden, making little milk-carton seed beds, learning about plant anatomy, guessing plant smells, generally frolicking with dirt, and daring them to touch worms. All told, a pretty successful event that kept the kids rapt for a good hour and a halfish.

Okay, I send long-winded nostalgic greetings to California and all the many people I love who are still there. I toast the pecan-pulque I am currently guzzling to all y'all. Goodnight!