 
# Mexico City

### Impressions in Words and Photographs

### James Hegarty

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2017 James Hegarty

TheCreativeEdgeBooks.com

Also by this author

To See: Tokyo Street Photography

Guts & Soul: Looking for Street Music and Finding Inspiration

New York 1979 1980: Street Photography Lost and Found

Street Photography: New York, New Orleans, Saint Louis, Chicago, San Francisco

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To Janet for all the travels that lie ahead.

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### Table of Contents

Preface

Aquí

Part One, Zona Rosa

The Elevator

Paseo de la Reforma

No Junk Food!

Nopales

Part Two, Juarez

Dancing in the Park

Ciudadela Market

The Angel of the Independence

Part Three, Doctores

Bombas

Part Four, Centro Histórico

The Roots

Street Musicians

El Zócalo

Metropolitan Cathedral

Part Five, Roma Norte

Improvisacion Libre

Groceries?

Part Six, Condessa

Parque México

Fuente de Cibeles

Wandering

Afterword

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Preface

The sound of voices, the color of the light, the shape of leaves moving in the breeze. The people I meet, even briefly, or friends I make along the way, or just the recognition (once again) that this jam session we call life is completely amazing in its vastness. We live on a planet full of unbelievably amazing goodness.

Growing up in the Midwestern United States, almost everything was far away. Which resulted in a whole hell of a lot of imagination and not very much reality. I recognize that the wanderings that I have finally been able to accomplish lately are the result of pent up curiosities that began a very long time ago.

Travel to new places is the opportunity to begin again. It is to start a new composition from the blank page, to compose an entirely new theme that has the freedom and energy to be completely without reference to anything in the past. To compose music is to manipulate experience, to fabricate the circumstances though which we live differently, if only for a few moments before we return to the real world of ourselves and our past and expected future.

Upon that moment, the composition began, the expectations were thrown away, the past was renounced, and I stepped into a maelstrom of an alternate reality that was without any reference to anything I could have foreseen or predicted. No matter how good Google street view is, it is no substitute for living. It is easy to know what every corner of every city on this planet looks like. But that really doesn't matter. It is not about the look. It is about the living, about the opportunity to begin again, to take up the clean blank score and to begin to write a melody, a new melody that has just been discovered inside our being, that quite probably existed there all along, actually, but needed to be discovered, magnified, and drawn into the foreground by circumstances of life outside expectation.

I was only dimly aware of the door closing behind me, of stepping out into the flow, the interchange of people as they carried their bags, looked at the computer monitors, made arrangements for a taxi. I was relishing those first few moments of transfiguration between myself of the past and myself as I would be. Walking across the hall, looking, reading the signs, observing, taking it all in through my own person internal slow motion dolly shot. A steadicam onesie through the opening scene.

I just let myself float there, in suspended animation for a few minutes, feeling the sensations and just absorbing the power of the moment.

It was a feeling of excitement, or expectation, of standing on the edge and looking out across the water. It was one of those moments of beginning anew that holds me in awe of the possibilities. I was about to step into the river, to become engulfed with a new experience, to become someone I had never been before, someone that I did not know, someone that I had no way of knowing, to experience something for completely without point of reference and absolutely no way of being prepared for. It was a complete vulnerability except it was entirely of my own doing, my own choice, to be thrown into a new world and to allow myself to be born again.

In the Pathetique piano sonata, Beethoven used the introduction set in a very slow tempos was his way of prepare the audience for the power of his musical ideas. His introduction builds anticipation, draws attention, holds the listener in a plot line that works up to a climax of harmonic tension and rhythmic contrast when suddenly the tempo races and the pent up tension bursts open with a glorious new musical theme. If this first day on the ground in Mexico were a symphony, this would have been the structural model.

And so I was, in the sense of a long slow build, absorbing those initial sensations and fragments of experience to begin to pull together a thought, a starting point for just what this new world would be and to begin to arrive at a notion of just what this new life, this new concept of my identity would look like and sound like, and feel like.

There is not many ways in this world to begin again so abruptly. The sun rises and sets, time moves slowly, days go by, weeks, months. I try to establish new modes of thinking, new frameworks that encourage new chord shapes or the invention of different combinations of rhythm. But at best they are long slow dissolves gradually morphing into something that just may be a little different, a little new, and a very hard won attempt at something unanticipated.

It would have been easy to head directly to the ATM, to withdraw a reasonable amount of local currency, and stop at the first official taxi dispatcher and hit the street. But I savored the moment, elongated it, walked from one end of the hall to the other, just looking, and absorbing the impressions.

Travel is about becoming the unexpected. It is about allowing oneself to become something different as the result of forces that are completely unknown or anticipated. I maintain that I am a free improv experimental musician because I relish the constant newness of sound, melody, texture, and relationships that can happen when all expectation and control is relinquished. I hold to the concept that there is order in abstraction and that even chaos is only a highly complex state of relationships. Listen to a free improv trio and you will hear the street, the subway, the intersection of the streams of mind as they flow together, interconnect and resonate, and come together in a music that is ever new and changing.

Whenever I am on the street, listening, observing, feeling, it is this music that I hear. A music of the spheres that is a synthesis of Philip Glass-like broken chords with the multitonal melodies of perhaps hundreds of individuals blending in consort as they move in orbits and trajectories through space and time.

It is a complex order, a profoundly interconnected matrix of layers and contexts. In a digital age, we can at least fathom such vastness, every time we send an email message or enter a URL.

It is about the selective capture of isolated moments that passed across my experience, a curated collection of impressions and perceptions that seemed representative of something at the time. Representative of what? Of what I was thinking about the experience, the journey. These moments encapsulate a timeline, a series of steps taken, on foot, through one small area of an extremely large and complex place.

It is about trying to comprehend complexity though momentary glimpses into representative samples. It is a social science research project in visual imagery. The choices I made, the perceptions that these photos portray were mine and the result of an ongoing evolution of thought and awareness. I can not claim understanding, I can not pretend knowledge. The multiple layers of life that exist in a place like Mexico City defy comprehension. A waiter serving me dinner in a restaurant off the corner of the Zócalo, finally after the meal was three-quarters finished finally admitted that he had lived in the States for 8 years and spoke English as well as I did. Until that time, we struggled to communicated in my pidgin Spanish and found enough common ground for me to end up with a truly delicious meal.

I went to Mexico to be inspired, to be altered, to find something new inside me and to discover something new about the world. I needed a kick, that jarring loose from just too much self-fulfilling expectation. It was time to crack open the seal and venture where every corner was not the same corner I'd turned over and over again, and each street lead somewhere I truly had never been before. My life had indeed become just too predictable. I was relying on Mexico to fix that!

That was the only plan. Walk, look very hard, see carefully, keep an open mind, look backwards as well as forwards, grab the fleeting moment or patiently await the unfolding of a scene. Respond as transparently as possible with an open heart and purpose of curiosity. Above all else, strive to discover what was truly there. Be a journalist _and_ an artist. Capture the real sense of what surrounded me, as unbiased and without preconception as possible. But apply the eye of an artist to make choices of the framing, be selective of the perspective, rely on the power of light to reveal the essence of the meaning.

It comes down to the meaning as separate from understanding or comprehension. I do not understand. But I sense the meaning, I feel the underlying humanity of every tiny moment on the street. The core of our lives are connected somehow. That we are all in this one place, together, on the street at the same time, is proof, to me. Some kind of connections brought us all here in this moment. It seems random, but I don't think it is. The order is beyond comprehension, but as with art, we can feel it, we can sense the presence of something deeper than simply one random fraction of a second followed by another.

But day after day, the routine of a recurring pattern of activities, somehow getting to work and returning home, accomplishing the same fundamental chores on a weekly basis, numb us to the beauty of the precious moments we have. For years I have been circling around one primary activity, over and over, with precious little time to stop and think about what is actually going on under the surface.

It is easier to break that spell when nothing is a repetition and there are absolutely no actions that are being repeated. Travel, the journey, the proverbial stepping into an ever changing river, is what breaks this circle of unending sameness.

Mexico City revived my perceptions and excited my imagination, it gave me a world of new sounds and images to process and assimilate. In words and photographs, I will try to share my experience of renewal!

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Aquì

"Donde el Metro?" she asks in a French accent. A beautiful blonde woman had come up to me on the Aveana Juarez. I was standing at a corner, watching the scene unfold, waiting for a photograph to materialize in front of me. People walk up to me and ask me for directions in places where I have never lived. In Spanish or French or English. It has happened to me in Paris, Tokyo, London and New York. And now, Mexico City. It is always an interesting moment. Strangely, I usually know the answer to their question.

I pointed up the street and she smiled. I had walked past the station just a few minutes previously. It was about a half block away.

For me, the journey starts with location, culture, food, architecture. I'm drawn to the details, discovery of the ways we have figured out how to live. The art we make, the music we sing or play, or the colors and textures of the rooms we build are infinitely varied and ever new to me. I have a very strong desire to get some kind of understanding of life somewhere else, removed from my own personal experience, built on a completely different set of criteria, developed along an entirely alternate line of perceptions. I travel because I want to stand on the ground and look and smell and hear and taste what it is like in someone else's neighborhood. I want to find out what it is like to live in another place that is very far from the place I already know.

The immediate impact is, for me, the feeling of stepping out of the airplane cabin and walking through the jetway. The air temperature and the humidity, that's what hits me first. Then, the moments after I disembarked from the plane, are always surreal. Dropped down in an entirely new world after traveling hundreds or even thousands of miles in an irrationally short amount time. The time-distance thing just doesn't compute. Where am I really and this can't possibly be so far away.

In the case of my first arrival in Mexico City, reality gradually ramped up. A transition that took place through a maze of institutionally sterile empty hallways, turning corners, walking some more, behind glass walls, keep going, turn again. Why? Where is this going? On and on, almost as if it were a kind of purgatory, just keep walking, more corners, more hallways. And then a doorway and I step into a big room, nearly empty except for a few people from my flight at the far opposite end.

The customs agent asks a couple of questions, stamps my passport, and waves me ahead. A few more steps past another agent and I push open a door into Mexico, not knowing what to expect..

I pause a moment, ahead is a long wide corridor lined with small vendor spaces, and several hundred people standing, waiting for their loved ones, or moving in every direction around and through the people in the hall.

Stepping through the door was monumental, epic. The soundtrack in my head was majestic but totally incongruous to the functional, almost bus-station ordinary-ness of the architecture. Is this a lesson in how NOT to score a scene? No. This juxtaposition of aesthetic qualities was working. In this scene, it was not about the stage set, the walls or the decorations. It was about the people, collectively, myself and everyone here. But no one else noticed, no one heard the cellos and basses digging into the pulsing bass line, the grit of rosin on string making the attacks extra hard and cutting. It was a swelling of complex harmonies, blending and moving in and out of sync to the pulse. In moments like this, I understand Philip Glass, I understand Aarvo Paart. The gravity of the slow moving power of a minimalist gesture really does communicate the impact of moments of change, moments of completely regenerated vision.

That's what I was searching for. Street photographers are a somewhat rugged crew. We spend hours on our feet, covering block after block, miles from where we started, constantly looking, always attentive, searching for the beauty or magic of any one, or all of us, embedded in the fleeting gesture or intersection of ordinary living. It is thankless and inspiring, it is beautiful and sometimes scary. On this particular day in Mexico City's Centro Histórico, in the centuries old Metropolitan Cathedral on the square known as Zócalo, the scene before me was from somewhere else, mystical maybe but certainly not the randomly captivating fleeting moment of human existence. And it just didn't connect. Not today.

I stepped out of the darkness and back into the sunshine. Camera ready, I was walking again. Looking, searching, grabbing impressions. I didn't want to miss anything. The streets of Mexico City truly captivated me. Thoroughly and intensely.

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Part One

Zona Rosa.

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The Elevator

The cash machine is printing a receipt but no money is coming out. Is this some kind of new scam? Or am I just incompetent to operate the machine. I thought I understood the prompts even though they were in Spanish, they were obviously the basic set of questions. I'm sure I must have hit a wrong button. Do it again. Read the prompts more carefully, be extra precise about the way I push the buttons. Again, a receipt is printing and there is no money.

I've made it through customs, figured out how to answer correctly when the agent asks what is this, pointing to my Canon 5d wrapped in bubblewrap. I survived that episode. Why can't I get some cash?

Far at the end of the hall against a blue wall, solitary and beckoning under a white spotlight looks like an oasis of cash, the perfect place for me to find enough pesos to get out of here. In some ways, it is starting to feel a little like an Escape Room only the cast of at least a thousand people moving about in all directions argues against the contrivance of a mind game.

"Descorpe" the machine's screen reads. Pardon us for not being able to dispense cash now.

Try that one, the red one, I tell myself. OK. A white machine standing against a red wall and this time it works. 2000 Pesos in all. About $100 US dollars. A stack of ten 100s and two five hundred bills.

I'm good to go.

The first day in a new city is always spectacular. Everything is new and there's a scene developing in every direction. I had made a connection in Houston and flown in that morning. Wanting to make the most of the day, I left St. Louis at 6am. I was on the ground in Mexico City by noon, got some cash and signed on to an "official" taxi for the ride to my rental.

I had printed out the address the night before and gave it to the drive. I wanted to make sure my poor language ability wouldn't land me in a completely incorrect location! Fortunately, it had transpired very easily and my ability to give him the address in Spanish was understood. No doubt the paper helped!

Sitting in the back seat of a pink and white taxi, unfamiliar make and model, probably a Toyota that we don't get in the States, I was looking out through the window and watching the city flash by. Large apartment blocks, rows upon rows of low two-story single building built one next to the other. Industrial buildings and vacant buildings. There's a McDonald's billboard, and signs advertising cell phones.

Palm trees! I'm a sucker for palm trees. It was early afternoon and the traffic was moving freely.

My thought was full of questions and I was concentrating on absorbing everything. Eventually we turn off the expressway and down onto the surface streets. Look at that storefront, what do they do there? Here's a group of people dressed in t-shirts and jeans, the universally acceptable wardrobe. "That's good, I'll fit in here," I said to myself.

Occasionally I would catch a glance at my phone's map and watch our little blue dot moving across the city. But I had absolutely no sense of scale. In the distance I saw the tall office buildings along the Paseo de la Reforma. That should have been a clue, but I didn't know that yet.

Winding our way through the neighborhood, I tried to pick out street names and remember locations on the maps I had studied. But I was disoriented, turned around.

Then we turned onto my street and I watched as the address numbers counted upwards to my destination. We stopped at the corner, I paid the fare and walked across the street to the entrance.

I called Raphael, the host of my temporary home came down to let me in. He graciously showed me around, gave me some suggestions for restaurants and activities. "The neighborhoods around here are safe. You can go out walking anytime." As he was leaving he said with a smile, "Enjoy yourself but don't burn down my apartment!"

Within minutes I had unpacked my camera and headed for the door. Flashbacks of maps I'd studied on the web flew across my memory. Anticipation was high. Soon I would be immersed in the sights and sounds of an entirely new world. I pressed the button for floor number one and tried to be patient as the elevator slowly descended.

My very first discovery happened before I even hit the street. I opened the elevator door. It opened like I was walking into a lima-bean green metal closet. As it closed behind me, silently, I pressed the button labeled "1." Very, very slowly it started to move. There was no door on the inside and the wall of the elevator shaft started moving infront of me. It had the distinct feel of a cold war era Soviet residential block. Which seemed very out of place because the rest of the building was very mid-century modern with mosaic tile and metal frame windows.

When the elevator stopped, I stepped out expecting to see the lobby and the exit. But instead, I was standing in the hallway of another upper floor of the building! Given the time-machine like feel of the slow elevator, it seemed just a bit like Alice in Wonderland or maybe in a more sinister moment, the Twilight Zone. Step into the green elevator and you'll come out on the same floor you just left. Over and over, I thought. Trapped for the rest of eternity in a Hitchcock film loop.

Pretty disorienting, I thought. After a moment I shook the daydreams out of my head and rationally walked over to look out the window. I was indeed on the first floor _above the ground floor_. My apartment was actually on the fifth floor, even though the button I push to deposit myself there is number four. OK its one of _those_ systems! Back in the elevator I take a wild guess and hit the button labeled "PB" (for Planta Bajo I learned later) which brought me to the ground floor, the exit, and out on to the street!

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Paseo de la Reforma

Maybe I cheated a little. There's a fine line between research and the spoiler effect.

Very early on I learned that it really bugs me to arrive somewhere new and say to myself, "yeah, it looks just like the picture." Sometimes I wonder what it must have been like to arrive at a destination completely without preconceptions, before photography, websites, and selfies. That's my ideal, but it's pretty much impossible today. So I try to walk that line between enough information to be safe and well informed, and getting over-saturated with other people's images and opinions.

Mexico has always fascinated me. The idea that there is an entire country full of people with such an exciting culture so near by, is pretty intriguing. If travel is about experiencing new insights and perspectives, it seems incredible to me that more people aren't going to Mexico all the time, and I mean someplace other than an all-in beach resort!

I had been to Mexico once before. It was a very fast day trip to Mexicali to help my sister retrieve her paintings from a gallery after her exhibition closed. I rented a van and we drove across the border from her home in California's Imperial Valley. I was driving without insurance so we stayed on mission. Other than the hour we spent sitting in line to cross back into the States, it was a very quick and focused trip. But it was enough to show me that I was right, there's an entirely different thing going on there and it just made me want to check it out even more.

So my earliest research on the web was examining maps of Mexico City. One of the first things that stands out is the Paseo de la Reforma.

The Paseo was built in 1860 as a suitably grand road for the newly crowned Emperor Maximilian to travel between his palace in the city and Chapultapec Castle on the southwest edge of town. Check it out on the map and it is the large prominent street that runs diagonally across the heart of the city, like Broadway in New York except much wider, grander. There's nothing like it in the US. Not even Fifth Avenue comes close.

As soon as I learned it resembled the Champs-Élysées, I was down. For some reason, this particular place completely captivated me from the very beginning. I had to find out what it was really like. So almost instantly upon arrival, I stepped out the door, turned right, and in about two blocks I was there.

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No Junk Food!

God forgive me but I have been known to go to McDonald's in moments of desperation or late nights working when nothing else is open. But not here, not this trip. In the taxi ride from the airport I made a vow, no American fast food, no Starbucks, no junk food. None of that stuff. I was here for the real thing.

I was here to nurture a new part of me, a piece of my identity that I never knew existed before. I was leaving the old Jim behind and trying on an entirely new way of thinking about myself. Keep what's working, and rehab the rest.

I will admit of temptation once. I walked into a convenience store and thought I'd just buy enough junk to get by. I was tired, hungry, and exhausted with trying to deal with the language. I grabbed a bag of pop corn and was standing there holding it. An inner struggle was going on, but no one would have been able to tell. I replaced it on the shelf and walked away. I turned around, _picked it up again_! And stood there. It would be so easy to go back to the apartment, pop it in the microwave and just call it a day. But why? What was the point? Just 'cause I'm tired? I put it down again and walked out of the store. On the next corner were my amigos, the restaurant that fed me so graciously that first night in the city. It was poetic or maybe even musical that I would have my last dinner there, as well.

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Nopales

The food arrived. The waiter placed a square piece of charcoal grey slate in front of each of us. Blue corn tortillas floating on the ripples of a dark grey sea, as if storm clouds were brewing. But it was a beautiful warm day. Cooler here under the umbrellas of the terrace restaurant at the Museo Tamayo.

I was having lunch with a friend, let's call her Alicia, though that's not her real name – no one uses their real name in books anymore, do they? She is a graduate of my department and we'd played a few gigs together, most recently on a concert in support of a new performing arts center on campus. She had stayed in the States to go to graduate school but I had not been in touch for a couple of years. A mutual friend of ours, when she heard I was heading to Mexico City, told me Alicia had returned home and was living there now. I contacted her on Facebook and we made plans to meet.

So here I was, reconnecting with an old friend and discussing the possibilities of bringing a group of college students here for a week to let them discover the art, music, culture, food, and people of this amazing city. What is a "must" for the itinerary? What would be cool to do but maybe optional? How many days should we be here? What would be the best time of year?

"The weather is always wonderful, here," she said. "Even in the winter, you might need a sweater in the morning and evening, but during the day – it's just like this!" And we basically grinned at the awesomeness of sitting here on a beautiful afternoon and thinking about all the really fantastic experiences that were just waiting for the students.

And then these spectacular plates of food arrive and all academic idealism vanishes. This looks incredible. Strip steak tacos with hand made blue corn tortillas, guacamole and nopales.

I've seen a few deserts in my time, my sister lives in a town surrounded by the western edge of the Mojave desert. She and I have been in the desert during a thunderstorm, and out in the blazing 120 degree heat. Appreciating the desert takes some adjustment. It is a subtle, nuanced, place. You have to give of yourself to appreciate the desert. You have to stop and look closely, listen, and take some time. Wait for the beauty to touch you, don't expect it to reach out and grab you. The desert waits.

And so I did not rush. I drizzled some lime on the steak, added some quac. Sipped my lemon-lime-cucumber drink. We talked. The nopales waited.

I don't know what I was expecting. It's green. So if I'd thought about it, it would be logical to expect it not to be all fruity and sweet. But in fact I had no expectations whatsoever. I was completely blank, open, and highly curious. Eating cactus, against the backdrop of my upbringing, would be not that far removed from the thought of actually enjoying the flavor of, let's say, the petals of a backyard tiger lily. At least there was at least a little bit of mystery involved, or perhaps even the kind of rock and roll swagger of slurping down an oyster, brine and all.

So I cut into it, slicing across the width being careful not to spoil the purity of this first bite with a touch of the guacamole.

In a moment, the windswept silence of the desert touched me and I knew another color, another dimension of the quiet vastness of a land covered in plants able to survive the harshness of an unrelenting sun.

Several times more I sliced away at the moist green leaf and each piece compounded the flavors that had come before. Trying to perceive the nuances, the shading of flavors, the texture, the aftertaste. I am left with a heathen's perception, "it tastes like leaves," I thought to myself, without a hint of irony. And so it was, more or less, the flavor of green. Fresh, yet a bit dark and soiled for the weeks or even years spent standing against the perception of nothingness or emptiness that the desert confronts on a daily basis. Nowhere does a plant community struggle against such unrelenting conditions for so little appreciation and overt beauty. To overcome an expectation of nothingness is the burden of our time, in fact. For if there is nothing more than the taste of leaves, why is that a disappointment? They were damn good leaves, I might add.

"I want to go up to the castle," Alicia said. And I was drawn back to reality. How long I had been sitting there, dreaming of the taste of nopales and the sound and smell of the desert I have no idea. I'm grateful she was polite enough to act like she didn't notice.

"And on the way, we can stop by and see the Voladores, you'll really like them."

Walking through the park, we passed colorful benches with men, women, and couples reading, talking, or enjoying the sunshine. We passed the National Museum of Anthropology, draped in an enormous Mexican flag in honor of Independence Day.

And as we were walking, the sound of flute music filled the air, which, if I had thought more about it, shouldn't have seen surprising. Wouldn't it be natural that as we strolled through the park on a warm afternoon, Alicia, my flutist friend, should be enveloped with the sound of flute music where ere she walked?

Stepping into a glen by the side of the path, we discovered the source of the music. Not ethereal, or fantastical at all. Rather, a man, dressed in traditional brightly colored clothing of red and blue sat high atop an aqua-colored metal pole where he was playing a flute in one hand and tapping out a rhythm on a small drum with the other. OK maybe that is a bit fantastical. But at least it's real.

At the base of the pole, four men, all dressed in similar traditional attire, were talking among themselves as if this was as normal as a sunny afternoon.

After a few minutes, the men, one after the other, ascended the pole by climbing up metal rungs welded against the side of the pole.

Once at the top, they grouped themselves on the corners of a square frame that was suspended out from the center of the pole. The flute and drum player seemed to be helping to get everything in position. Then without fanfare, the music began again and the four men, sitting at the corners of the square, let go and fell backwards towards into the air.

Their feet were bound with a rope that trailed out from the top of the pole. The square frame rotated and the men spiraled slowly around in the air. As they slowly spun away from the top of the pole, momentum pulled them further away from the center and out into graceful arcs, each man flying upside down, suspended by one leg and holding poses with arms outstretched.

It was an air ballet of encircling symmetry, balance, and inexplicable yet profound grace. The flute music provided a soundtrack that was ethereal in its haunting simplicity of traditional rhythms and four-note melodic structure, drawing me again into another dimension of experience.

With each time around the pole, the ropes inched longer and the men flew closer and closer to the ground. When they were still high in the air, the lengthening ropes allowed them to swing outward from the pole with arching gestures. Later, as they approached the ground, the swung in more even circles, each flyer measuring the distance to the approaching ground with an outstretched arm.

They held their hand down toward the ground, their fingers trailing through the grass until the final seconds of flight. Suddenly, together, they pulled themselves upright upon the rope and landed, feet first running along the ground for a few last seconds.

The opera concludes. Drama and spectacle, and an undercurrent of real danger overcome with bravery. I stood in admiration and pondered for a moment a vision of reality revolving upside down, suspended in the air in defiance of the pull of gravity. And then I realized it is gravity itself, the underlying force we all must contend with, that propels them and all of us. If the properties of physics are true, that for every force there is an equal and opposite force, gravity is met with an equal and opposite force that pushes us up, suspends us, lifts us higher even as we throw our own force into the mix.

Despite appearances, and the everyday conditions of the ordinary world, it seems like everything is pulling down, that the burden of work is to overcome a downward tendency. Yet these flyers prove otherwise, that it is indeed possible to float and soar above the pull of gravity.

Of many of the artists I know, it is a struggle to create. I attended a show of artists I know well, oils, sculpture, mixed media, watercolor. As people move through the gallery, viewing the pieces, they stop, look, absorb something of the statement. It is often a passing glance and on rare occasions there is a deep commitment on the part of the viewer.

In the museum galleries today, I was profoundly moved and inspired. The work was fresh, technical in a way that was clearly finely crafted but the mechanics were transparent, the images and content was sharply rendered and clearly focused, tight finely honed works with a sense of grace, beauty, and poignant relevance. The work transcends gravity. It soars above the ground and fills the air with a vision of someone who has seen things I will never see, felt things I can not, and experienced life beyond a threshold I will probably never cross.

Art gives us this. Freely and selflessly. But for my artist friends and myself, the effort to realize these visions seems to be a constant struggle to overcome the downward pull of gravity. The seemingly unrelenting need to buy groceries, meet expectations at work, fulfill a litany of requests that meet the needs of our friends and family. And within this sphere of action, amid the forces pulling in all directions, the artist grabs a rope and throws himself or herself into the air, trusting in an equal and opposite force to oppose the gravitational pull toward the ground. In those moments of airborne freedom, art is made, visions are shared, and a work of art comes to life that holds the ability to direct our thought into new directions, to guide us, in small iterations, upward against the pull of the ground, until we just might someday find that the power we have ourselves can fall in the balance against gravity and lift us higher, in arching spirals towards an imaginary vanishing point. A point where we can all see with the heart and mind of someone who has flown through the air or seen beyond the horizon of human possibility.

And demonstrated the possibility of anti-gravitational thinking.

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Part Two

Juarez.

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The Angel of the Independence

Let me say that there is probably a reason I am an improvising musician. Planning ahead is never my highest priority. I figure it's a lot more interesting to just jump in and figure it out on the fly. I realize it's not the most profound business model, but things have a way of working out.

And so I had arrived in Mexico City not knowing it was the week of Independence Day. When Alicia told me about the holiday, she gave me one of those looks that I get pretty often that reads something like, "are you serious??" I honestly didn't know! And she thought that was pretty incredible. Yes, it was.

My first reaction was that restaurants would be closed, everything would shut down and the place would be totally vacant. I'd be in CDMX at a time when everyone else was somewhere else.

Totally untrue. A lot of restaurants were open because people were going out for dinner to celebrate. The city closed the streets and people were out walking everywhere, families with kids, grandparents, couples, dogs, bikes, in every possible combination. The buildings along the Paseo de la Reforma were lit up in green, white, and orange. There were flags flying everywhere.

For at least a week, it seems, the city was preparing for Friday night. Enormous bleachers and a sound system were installed in the Zócalo, a music stage and lighting effects were set up in the plaza of the Angel of the Independence, referred to as El Ángel.

Late Friday afternoon I was back at the apartment, taking a break after a long day on the street and grabbing something to drink. I collected my video gear and waited for things to heat up. Around eight in the evening I set out, heading up the street towards the Paseo, the Angel of the Independence towering ahead of us.

It was a warm clear night with a slight breeze. The dark night sky was glowing with the reflected light of the city. Streetlights and the office lights of the office towers that lined the aveneda cast theatrical blue-white light on the street like a stage set. I joined the flow of people walking towards the Angle of the Reformation, visible in the distance through the trees that arch outward over the street from the median. Along the way, we passed corporate offices, stores, banks, and the MacStore decorated in national colors and banners.

In a few blocks the sound of music grabbed my attention. A band was playing at one end of the plaza. Large screen projections flanked the stage and an awesome sound system projected the music in every direction.

Mexico became independent from Spain in September of 1821 but the revolution began in the early morning hours of September 16, 1810.

Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla was in the town of Dolores where had been leading secret meetings where the people would discuss the possibility of a revolution. The Spanish government were informed this group's activity and planned to arrest them. Realizing they would be captured soon, at around 2:30 in the morning Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla rang the church bell to awaken the town and draw everyone to the church. That evening he exhorted the people to fight for the independence of Mexico. His speech has become known as the Grito de Dolores.

It is this moment in history that is celebrated on the eve of Mexican Independence Day. Today the main celebration is held in the Plaza de la Constitución, known as the Zócalo, and the square is filled with as many as a million people. But there are other celebrations throughout the city including the Monumento a la Independencia or El Ángel, which contains the remains of Hidalgo and other independence leaders.

At eleven in the evening, the President of Mexico addresses the people from one of the balconies of the National Palace which fronts the eastern side of the Zócalo. He rings the very same bell Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla rang back in 1810. The President then recites the Grito and everyone shouts the refrain, "¡Viva!" The President rings the bell again and waves the flag of Mexico.

In the plaza around El Ángel there were crowds of people in every direction. Some were strolling in the streets, others were sitting on the steps of the monument or standing on the upper platform. Others were sitting in the sloping grass that surrounded the monument talking and listening to the music. Kids played with giant balloons that bounced high in the air. I wanted one.

When the music ended people kept hanging around. No one wanted the party to end. Kids still chased each other, dogs and bikes and balloons constantly in motion. People were silhouetted against the colored lights on the monument, and the decorative lighting suspended over the street filled the area with an intense glow. The air was warm, there was a cool breeze. Eventually people started to turn in the direction of their homes, heading off down small side streets or walking slowly along the Paseo.

The joyful sense of community that I felt that night at the celebration made me rethink my own perspective on freedom. Back again at my rental, as I was sitting on the balcony looking out across the tops of the tall buildings bathed in patriotic colored light, the power of freedom hit me hard. To live in a country colonized by a distant power and to live a life conformed to an external set of cultural paradigms would change everything. As an artist, it never occurs to me to be concerned about what my government thinks of my work, to be afraid to say something because I could end up in jail, or to immediately dismiss an idea because it is ideologically forbidden.

I never thought I took freedom for granted. But that night, I looked out at the darkened sky and realized I don't really value it enough.

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Dancing in the Park

The early afternoon sun was filtering through the canopy of leaves above me. I had stepped into the shade of the Plaza de la Ciudadela. A group of guys were hanging around over by a circular row of benches. It seemed like they were taking turns making speeches or something. When I rounded the entrance and first saw them, a guy was just stepping down off a bench. Everyone around seemed to be discussing something. Politics, that's my guess. It might have looked a little rough, but it wasn't. I had to walk though the group on my way into the park but other than a few looks of "what's up" they were too intent on their discussions to pay this random gringo dude any attention.

I stood around for a while. Checking out the scene. As an urban photographer my intent isn't just flyby shooting and move on. Maybe the camera is an excuse to hang out, to sit down, or lean against a post for a while and take a long look at the world, connect with the feel, become part of it, at least for a moment. Blending in, a little, maybe, no one notices, and then the little details start to come out.

After about five minutes I notice the really interesting black stencil spray painted on the wall of the little cantina over there. A dashing hombre in a fedora and bold dark mustache. "Plaza del Danzon" it reads. Yes, that's definitely this place. If you're a dancer, you know this. But I stumbled in, two left feet and not much rhythm in that part of me. It's a good thing I don't play the piano with my toes. Saturdays, starting at noon, this is the place to be. The atmosphere was rich, with a spell of romance or mystery. Light filtered down through the trees and the music pulsated with a syncopated rhythm that inspires dreams of soft breezes and the touch of her hair.

Time passed, the guys hung around, the men and women danced, and the sun continued to create moving patterns on the ground as the leave blew in a gentle breeze. A car rattled by occasionally out in the street, people visited with their friends, and I took a few photos. A group of men and women dressed in mid 20th century fashion were dancing a slow, graceful series of coordinated steps. They made me feel like I had been transported into a world far away in time. Was I in Cuba? Was this the 40s? Had I time traveled to an earlier era? Was this nostalgia, or the future? Maybe it's the same thing. Someday, time will be completely personal and we'll skip and shimmy from one era to another all at the same time. I'll make an appointment to see you 30 years ago, or maybe 10 years from now on New Year's Eve. Can you check your calendar? Send me an invite, OK?

Motion, the expression of movement and individuality is about being in a completely individual sense of balance and momentum. If it's so much about a personal sense of place and space, why can't it also be a personal awareness of time? Time, place, we make it for ourselves and we inhabit it. The guys talking about politics and solving the world's problems just might be the future. And they just might have the idea we need to fix those damn things that keep holding us down. The man in the green shirt and his partner, dressed in white, is she an angel from the past, is he an angel from the future linked in that moment for everyone willing to stop and absorb it, to ponder the implications of a possible continuity that's just maybe a bit abstract? I'm giving it a try, maybe.

And then I walk away toward the other end of the park. There's a monument there. A big tall thing out in the open, the trees are forced back by an encircling band of concrete.

Time feels fluid here. The architectural backdrop of these scenes is so authentically period without even trying that it isn't hard to imagine slipping into their era. Change the historical reference of the fashion, as the dancers highly stylized suits and dresses do, and the entire point of reference shifts. There is not a single moment of "now" here. Time shifts forward into the future or backward to previous eras with the juxtaposition of references overlapping against each other.

The monument to José María Morelos, a famous leader of the Mexican war of independence, is surrounded by four canons and a base that rises a few steps above ground level. Here, a couple of high school kids, a guy and a girl, are hanging out in one corner of this elevated stage-like platform. They've got a boom box and some hip-hop is playing. He's dancing, legs splaying out left and right, high energy, locked to the beat of the track. For a moment, she joins him, in perfect sync, but she quits after a dozen steps. And then he sort of lets it go, too. Why? They looked so cool I wanted to see more. Time travel maybe, just not entirely materialized in this moment, perhaps. Give them six, eight, ten years. They'll be on Broadway, or someone's music video. And this moment will rematerialize into something more developed. Or maybe this was just the beginning. The first few tentative steps that lead down a path towards something entirely amazing, towards a future that will be discovered another day in the park yet to come. It could be.

I'm pretty new to this time and space travel thing.

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Ciudadela Market

On the floor was a large basket full of small brown puppies. Reddish-brown clay pups in many different doggie poses. Some were standing, others sitting, stretched out howling at the moon, tails wagging, or looking away at something in the distance. They caught my eye and I selected one. "Quanta cuesta," I asked. How much does this cost? It was something like ciento pesos, fifty pesos. It seemed like a lot of the small toys and objects were priced at ciento pesos. He picked it up and blew into it. There was a small hole on the back and two larger holes on the side. It was a miniature ocarina that could play two pitches! I had to have more than one, "Yo nessicito uno mas!" I said smiling and went to select a different pose. These were gifts, one for my son, a true dog lover, and one for me for my collection of musical objects.

The Mercado de Artesanias La Ciudadela was established in 1968 in preparation for the 1968 Summer Olympics to promote the arts and crafts of Mexico's cultural heritage. It is located across the street from the Plaza de la Ciudadela where the dance music was still playing, now in the distance. It is a bright yellow-orange painted jumble of buildings.

I stepped through the doorway on the side of the building and into a narrow hall stretching into the distance, hallways leading off in three directions, with other hallways intersecting. Sometimes there was a real roof over head. At other times, the hallway was actually an opening between buildings that was covered by translucent plastic sheets. The light was filtered, gritty, opalescent sometimes, dramatic when the sunshine pierced through a high window, casting a spotlight beam down onto a brightly colored object. Each stall was unique. Even though there were several that carried woven fabrics and clothing, or baskets, the items displayed were entirely individual to the vendor's interests or native region.

I was in search of colors, textures, something handmade, something that carried some spirit inside it. Something shaped and finished by hand, the actual real thing that a person made. This was an archeological expedition, a quest for artifacts that carried the touch of uniqueness and authenticity.

Deeper into the maze I wandered, past stalls of children's toys, silver jewelry – rings, necklaces, ear rings - men's dress hats like the ones the men were wearing at the dance in the park, leather shoes and sandals, and an entire stall devoted to imaginatively decorated piggy banks.

I had wandered from one hallway to the next without leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to find my way out. But it didn't matter. Each shop was intriguing and filled with the most interesting handwork. I was lost in the depths of the market but it didn't matter because everything was so cool, so amazingly colorful and captivating.

It was now mid-afternoon and I suddenly realized I was starving. Like a mirage, or a miracle, somewhere in the middle of the market, down one hallway and turn left or right a totally random number of times, an oasis of great smells lured me in. I asked for a table and with a high level of gratitude and appreciation I followed the hostess to a table.

This time, as in absolutely every instance of my interaction with the people of Mexico City, they were absolutely kind and sweet to me. We would laugh at the things that came out of my mouth, they would correct me with a grin on their face, and when absolutely necessary switch effortlessly into a wide range of English fluency. It worked and it was all in the best of spirits. The people I met expressed an astonishingly high level of peace and joy for urban dwellers in the largest city in the western hemisphere. Maybe it is Mexico City's weather, or the availability of awesome food everywhere, I don't know, but despite how feeble my attempts to join the culture had been, they just didn't care and treated me well in every way.

The waitress brought me my food – tortilla soup and beef tacos. And if I haven't said it enough already, the food was delicious. Here in the depths of a craft mall, without a street level presence, there were at least eight or ten tables filled with people in the middle of the afternoon, eating something, hanging out, and having conversations. The food didn't need to be anything more than functional. At home in the States, that's what it would have been, I'm afraid to suggest. But not so here. Everything was delicious.

Rejuvenated, I set out again. The plan was to spend the cash I had in my wallet. It was probably a good thing all I had was about 500 pesos. I could have bought so many things. Baskets, woven fabrics, an awesome alpaca sweater (itself about $2,500 pesos, about $125 USD and well worth the price), dishes and other pottery, and children's toys. Or maybe a tablecloth, apron, blanket, bedspread, some shoes or sandals, or perhaps just a few more baskets. Did I say baskets? They're awesome – colorful, each unique, and spanning a wide range of sizes and silhouettes all they from little secret containers to standing vessels. I stepped into a silver stall filled with rings, bracelets, earrings, necklaces. I started to select some items and handed them to the woman behind the counter. A pair of earrings for my wife, another set of big silver hoops. A couple of chunky silver rings for myself. It's about time I started making the step into a new fashion statement, I told myself. Oh, and I'll take that necklace, too. Janet really likes big chunky necklaces.

"Quanta questa," I asked. "Por la gram" she replied. She took out a small scale and weighed each item. In a small spiral bound notebook she wrote the weight of each. Then she took out one of those big oversized calculators with the huge buttons and typed in umbers. Next to each weight she noted another number. I soon learned that I had spent two or three times the amount in my wallet. I smiled and said "lo siento Senora. Solament etsa" as I pointed to Janet's earrings. No chunky rings, no beautiful hand crafted necklace. Oh well. Not on this trip anyway.

As the afternoon faded away, I wanted to return to my rental to regroup and make a plan for the evening. I wandered my way back to the entrance poking again through the maze of corridors, my arms full of little bags of discoveries I had found. As I turned a corner I found myself again at the point where it all began, a stall filled with woven fabrics of so many colors and sizes. I glanced down and saw the same bedspread I had admired when I first entered earlier in the day. It was woven of a fine thread with wide bands of pink and coral. This would look fantastic in our bedroom I had thought and it again caught my eye. With an empty wallet I was particularly disappointed. But I took a chance.

"Quanto questa" I asked once again. "Siete cientos," she said (about $35 USD). "Con credit," I said in clumsy Spanglish and showing her my Visa card. "Si!" she replied. Awesome! And we stepped further into the back area of the stall. Another woman was sitting there, watching. Her madre, I am certain. She ran the card and I signed. "Muchas Gracias," I said with full enthusiasm and said "adios" to the woman and her mother. Her mother smiled and nodded back in return. And I stepped out of the stall, crossed the corridor, and out into the sunshine.

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Part Three

Doctores.

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Bombas

I definitely got the look. You might know what I mean. That look you get when you're kind of in the wrong place, or at least it kind a looks like you don't belong here, gringo.

I was walking along the edge of the Colonia Doctores, a neighborhood some websites will tell you to avoid. But I was on a mission to explore another craft market just a bit south of the Centro Histórico. And for a couple of blocks, Juarez and Doctores meet. So I was paying attention, watching the map on my phone and carefully plotting my course.

As I continued east, the landscape gradually changed. It's a subtle change at first. The Passeo de la Reforma has headed northeast for a while and is now several blocks away. We're no longer in the shadow of the corporate towers. The streets are still tree-lined, and there's little traffic. Most are residential two and three story buildings - old homes converted to apartments or larger apartment buildings from the early 20th century. It was Saturday as well as Independence Day, and nearly every shop was closed.

I noticed several automotive repair garages and small storefronts with their rolling metal shutters pulled down, places that repaired things like radiators. Across the street from a large tire store, a guy was giving me the look. I kept walking, looked at my map, and adjusted my route to go further out of the way to avoid heading deeper into the Colonia.

I turned a corner and headed north down a small side street filled with individual shops. A small storefront was covered with painted signs. "Bombas y Cilindros de Freno." Bombas? That sounds cool, I want at least one, I'm sure.

Cars are magical creatures and they have always fascinated me. I came by it honestly. My dad was a mechanical engineer and he pretty much knew how everything was put together, including every aspect of a car. For a while we owned a certified street legal Mustang stock car. In order to qualify for NASCAR stock car regulations, the manufactures need to sell 500 cars built with the same unmodded chassis and engine for street use by the public. Our car was one of these. Which is to say it was really fast.

And now you know, deep down, just how much of a gearhead I really am.

So when I finally arrived at the market, the main thing I noticed was the enormous automotive supply store across the street. I was thoroughly distracted from the main historical point of the area: La Ciudadela, the citadel. Originally built in 1807 as a tobacco factory, it became a headquarters and later prison during the war of Independence. In 1946 Jóse Vasconcelos founded a library there and it is now the Biblioteca de México, the main public library with over 580,000 items in the collection.

Located on the southeast corner of the library, the market consists of stalls lining both sides of the sidewalk with a narrow opening between. As I walked through the passageway, stacks and stacks of books were displayed. There were old Life magazines, piles of novels, science books, ancient college textbooks. It was the kind of place I would naturally have enjoyed spending an hour or longer sifting through the collections, looking for something musical, something unusual. I grabbed a couple of photos and continued walking through the market.

At the corner of the street where the market ended, I stopped to consider where to go next. There was a small park there, completely jammed with people. What was going on, I thought. What are all these people doing?

At the edge of the park a story teller had attracted a small audience. Even without an understanding of the language, it was pretty clear from his actions and, let's call them "physical gestures," that the main character was having some kind of very active sex almost all the time. Interesting, I guess.

But the large group of people were in the center of the park, around a small fountain. As I entered the group, there were blankets laid on the ground covered with collections of Hot Wheels cars displayed in neat rows, or piled into a clump off on the side. Some were worn from use and others were absolutely pristine in their original unopened packaging. The group was almost entirely men, hanging in groups talking and surveying each other's collections. Throughout the central part of the park, on the fountain edge, the benches, and the sidewalks, in every direction, guys had brought their collections to display and trade and discuss. I looked at the cars, walked through the park, and stood appreciating the moment with a big silly grin on my face at the supreme simplicity and awesomeness of these guys.

So what exactly was this all about? Later that evening, looking at the map and retracing my steps, I noticed that indeed the Hot Wheels Club warranted a marker on the map. Square in the middle of the Parque Balderas. Who knew?

And "Bombas?" Well despite the imagery it suggested in my head at the time, it turns out it means simply "pumps," as in brake pumps, what are called in the States, brake master cylinders. But in my defense (if you believe the Urban Dictionary) there's a slang use of the term that refers to lowriders, cars from the mid 1950s, big and round (like the stylized bombs in old cartoons) and highly customized with lowered suspensions, hyped up American V8 engines, and elaborate paint jobs. It's pretty clear which meaning was referenced by the shop's signage, but I'm going with answer number two!

I would never have thought to search out this scene, but the experience of seeing all those guys hanging out and just digging their cars, having a chill afternoon in the park, had been pretty fun indeed. Sharing in the collective imagination of what it would feel like to push a Z28 Camero up through the gears on an open road, listening to the sound of the engine and smiling at the power of a true bomba was just the ultimate dream experience, man. I could totally relate!

Stepping out of the park an on the street, I was now almost three miles from home. My feet needed to take a pause and I knew it was time to call for some reinforcement. I pulled out my phone and tapped the Uber app. In four short minutes I was in the back seat of a faded blue Hyundai compact sedan. Not exactly the bomba of my dreams but it was moving along quite nicely, thank you. Streets and buildings were scrolling past my window. As I sat in the back of car, watching the people, the buildings, the signs, the colors, it was like a flashback transition in a film.

My thoughts were racing through a list of possibilities. Tomorrow I was heading back to my ordinary existence but there were a few precious hours remaining!

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Part Four

Centro Histórico

__________

The Roots

I had arrived in Mexico City with one appointment in an otherwise intentionally empty calendar. In my ordinary life I can have upwards of seven or eight meetings a day. College administration is a community effort. Nothing happens in isolation and everyone needs to give input. It gets intense, day after day.

So lately, my idea of a good time is having no commitments, keeping everything unplanned, and just grabbing whatever comes along that looks cool or intriguing. Just don't tie me down. It happens rarely, to be sure, but when it does, the openness is a beautiful thing to behold.

But this appointment was different from all those jamming up my calendar at home. Very different, and I was really excited! After returning to Mexico City upon completion of grad school Alicia started getting performing gigs. Now, just a few years later, she's playing in the opera orchestra, a position she refers to as her dream job! And they were offering an open dress rehearsal, and amusingly it's Puccini's Girl of the Golden West. Alicia snagged me a ticket so I would be able to attend!

Around the back of the cathedral was an inviting restaurant. The richest and darkest chicken mole I've every had. After that meal, I was feeling like the day had been completely awesome, and there was a lot more cool stuff ahead.

I walked back through the Histórico towards the Palacio de Bellas Artes Arts that I had passed on the way to the Zócalo. This time, I walked back on a different street, avoiding the crowds and the hawkers and having an opportunity to really take in the 17th century architecture and linger a little as I walked past some interesting shop windows. If I had simply entered and exited down the Calle Francisco I. Madero, my perception of the Centro Histórico would have been entirely incorrect. The overbearing commercialism is pretty much limited to that one street. In many ways I was reminded of the French Quarter in New Orleans. There, Bourbon Street is a complete zoo but when you get away from there, it becomes possible to see the architecture without distraction and to feel what the place is really like. It proved true here, as well.

The age and the massiveness of the buildings began to speak to me. As I walked down the side streets in the sunshine I began to appreciate the depth of history here, to feel somewhat the roots of a city that just may be the oldest in the western hemisphere. It is hard to make that connection today. Cities change, evolve, the old is torn down and the new rises higher and higher in an international style that leaves heritage and the backstory hidden away somewhere.

It always takes some time, and some effort, and maybe even luck to turn a corner and catch a glimpse of a heritage unappropriated by commercialism or commerce. The real deal doesn't drop in your lap. You have to go looking for it, searching, asking questions, and deeply listening. For a few moments that day, as I walked towards the appointment with my friend, with the echoes of a religious ritual held in the Baroque era Metropolitan Tabernacle and the warm sensation of an excellent Nuevo Mexicano meal resonating against each other, time became irrelevant in a vision of centuries of culture and human endeavor. The misguided and the heroic, the inspired and the mundane all coming together in a multidimensional insight that made me feel grounded, connected, enveloped in a sense by the ages. I could have been here before and I could well stand in the place again in another time, another year, another lifetime, even. There was a bridge, a portal, that showed me, in my imagination or maybe it was another dimension of reality, the heart and the soul of a city living on amid the chatter and noise of the street, against a backdrop of street level economic striving, and upon the ground that that we all share.

This was that moment when I became aware of the power of heritage here, that Mexico City became more than an architectural backdrop, deeper than a cultural alternative to my own experience, and an impetus to spark my own creativity.

Mexico City became a living, breathing thing, a person or collective humanity valuable in its own right and not just a playground for me for a few days to get away from it all and grab some interesting photos. In that slow walk to the opera, I grasped meaning, and maybe even a glimmer of understanding. I arrived at a deep appreciation of Mexico City for what it is and not for want I was trying to get out of it. Not what it does for me, but for what it is for itself.

This is why Mexico City is so awesome. The heritage is here and the roots are visible. If one just cares to look and makes an effort to really perceive, to take it in without a personal overlay of expectations or needs, it will speak with the depth of the ages.

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Street Musicians

"I'm here to photograph street musicians." That's my usual story. For almost ten years now, it has been the focus of my academic research. I've made films, shot still images, interviewed musicians, cataloged the rules in numerous cities, and written on the social issues. It all started for me in the immediacy of the moment. As an improvising musician, I'm fascinated with spontaneity, especially in music performance. As I was growing up in Chicago, I saw a lot of musicians working the street, connecting with an audience that was always, inherently, walking away.

How do you deal with that? How do you capture attention against a backdrop of a busy urban landscape, appointments, trains to catch, and an infinite number of other demands and distractions?

In the world where we live today, bombarded with responsibilities and timetables, it seems impossible, on the street or even in the concert hall. So I started to pay closer attention. And eventually I asked questions.

Among the many types of street performers, musicians receive the lowest tips. Acrobats, sword swallowers, anyone doing anything with fire brings in the big bucks. And it can actually be a pretty big chunk of change, as much as a thousand dollars a day in places like Times Square or Fisherman's Warf. But musicians, it's pretty sad how little cash comes in sometimes.

During the five days I was on the ground, the number of street musicians that I observed was surprisingly low.

There was a man playing accordion, his wife sitting next time him, listening. I took the music to be authentic folk compositions performed in an indigenous style. Their appearance reinforced a connection with the rural areas of the country and I enjoyed his playing. It was soft, subdued, even intimate despite the setting of a large open area in the park. His wife sat motionless, clearly following the music in her head but without any outward expression. I asked to film them because the music as well as their soulful intensity touched me. The music was not elaborate, the performance was most definitely not devised to attract attention. They were performing music that clearly was meaningful to them, and anyone was welcome to hear it too. It was a special moment.

As I walked through the various Colonias, or along the Paseo, musicians were scattered in seemingly random places. One man, a trumpet player was making the rounds from one outdoor café to another in the circle around the Fuente de Cibeles.

Another, a violinist, was standing far back from the flow of pedestrians along the Paseo, playing his music with virtually no recognition from anyone passing by.

I saw a man and woman playing in the shadows of a colonial building near the Zócalo. She had a small hand drum and he played a guitar.

The first organ grinder that I encountered had positioned himself in the center of the pedestrian traffic flow, sunshine falling directly upon him like a spotlight. Behind him stood a tall colonial building, aged and darkened with time. The lighting, the ornate details of the building, the contrast between his desert tan uniform and the building made the scene highly photogenic. I shot several photos and made some videos.

What I did not know at the time, however, was that the union of organ grinders are dispersed throughout the city. With somewhere between 50 and 100 organ grinders continuing the tradition, this was not nearly the unique moment I thought it was, at the time.

I'm OK with that. The instruments themselves are beautiful. Artifacts of the early 19th century and preserved in top condition, carrying on the heritage of their trade within the constant forward motion of change in one of the most progressive places I have ever been. Most organ grinders choose to continue to play the classics of that era and hearing the music of Strauss or Chopin on the street gives the scene an entirely different emotion. I was left feeling, yet again, a cinematic rush surrounding me.

Over the next few days other organ grinders came across my path, a man in the median of the Avenida Chapultepec playing for the cars stopped at the traffic light, a woman around the back side of the Metropolitan Cathedral away from the noise and crowds, lending a sense of bright flute-like jubilance against a backdrop of heavy darkened Baroque architecture.

One evening, as I sat on my balcony resting from a long walk and drinking Lemon & Nada out of a Stella Artois goblet, the distant piping of an organ grinder mixed with the sounds of the street below.

It is the past carried forward into the present and unlike early recordings, this is the real thing, the true, complete, authentic sound of a time long gone. It is collage, and remix, reference and artifact held together by a matrix of contexts so vast and interwoven it would be impossible for me to begin to comprehend. What the music represents to me is the timelessness of art, on the street bold and outreaching or intimate and refined, it sustains. The vision sustains, music remains in my ear.

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El Zócalo

Crossing into the Centro Histórico was like plunging into a raging river: a surreal juxtaposition of a flowing throng of people being pulled with the force of some kind of gravity towards the Zócalo, the main square. I stepped in and just moved with the flow. Hawkers were everywhere calling out to everyone and shoving leaflets into my hand. Restaurants, clothing stores, and shoe shops lined the walking street. This was the only place I experienced such extreme commercialism. Oddly incongruent against the backdrop of colonial architecture of a another age. It reminded me of Soho somehow – the brick and iron loft buildings of Lower Manhattan's early mercantile days now transformed into hip chic boutiques in a "Back to the Future" sort of unexpected but inevitable evolution. But here in the heart of CDMX where the architecture was much older and more historically profound (the still-standing references to colonialism), the juxtaposition of centuries again disoriented my sense of time and context.

Weaving through the flow of people, I could stop and look down the cross streets and block out the distractions of the people thrusting leaflets into my hands and really focus on absorbing the sensation of being in one of the oldest cities in the world. It was a spellbinding experience.

For centuries, people had migrated to the Valley of Mexico and developed small city-states around lake Texcoco. Texcoco was large, shallow, and dotted with numerous islands. According to legend, the Mexica people of Tenochtitlan were searching for new homelands and they were given a sign that an eagle with a snake in its beak and perched atop a nopal cactus would indicate the place of their new city.

The Mexica wandered the region for about 260 years until finally two priests discovered the sign on an islet on the western edge of Lake Texcoco. This is where they built their city, Tenochtitlan. This was the year 1325.

In a gross oversimplification, the lake was large and shallow with swamps in many areas. Over centuries, flooding was a constant impediment to growth of the city. However they built aqueducts to supply the population with potable water and began to build drainage systems.

In 1521 Cortez conquered the city for Spain beginning the colonial period which lasted three hundred years until 1821. During this time the city grew, large impressive buildings in the Baroque and later classical styles were built. But flooding continued to be a major problem and stagnate water was a health problem.

As the city grew, the population spread to Coyoacán, a small settlement on an island nearby. During the thirty years of his rule, Porfirio Diaz successfully completed the drainage project and flooding finally ended and the lake waters began to recede.

With lowering water levels, more land became available for settlement and the city grew. The Paseo de la Reforma was built in the French style in a deliberate effort to replicate the grandeur of the Champs Elysses. As with most aspects of the Porfiriato period at the beginning of the 20th century, French ideals, style, and design were highly admired and imitated. This Porfirian style of architecture was a mix of French, Roman, Gothic, and Moorish elements. There remain buildings in the Colonia Polenco with mansard roofs, a deliberate reference to French architecture.

It is reported that as recently as the turn of the 20th century, drainage ditches along the Avenida Bucareli still contained water. Fourteen additional steps have been added to the base of the Angel of Independence due to the ground around the monument sinking.

In my ignorance but with a traveler's dumb luck, I had arrived the week of Independence Day and the celebrations would begin tomorrow. As I came to the end of the street, where I had anticipated being washed out onto the shore of the immense square, the Zócalo, instead an enormous seating riser stretching two stories into the sky block the view completely!

As I moved with the flow of the crowd into the square, all I could see were barricades, towers of seating areas, and legions of people focused on the preparations. My fellow pedestrians and I were directed into ever narrowing paths between barricades. All foot traffic was routed around the perimeter allowing the square itself to become an enormous stage with columns of speaker systems, lighting trusses, and a Frank-Gary-like giant abstracted geometric stage where the bands would perform.

Soon an enormous part would happen here and the air was abuzz with anticipation. Venders were setting up their stalls and people were hanging out wherever they could find room to stand or sit. In the distance I heard the sound of musical instruments, trumpets maybe, playing a simple melody. Focusing on it, I homed in on the direction and walked toward the sounds.

I had not discovered very many street musicians on this visit so I was particularly excited to find the source of this music. The quest to find street music is an inexact science. Sometimes, it is clearly obvious where musicians will site themselves. The simple answer is wherever there are a lot of people passing by. Some cities have strict regulations that narrow the locations. But I was finding Mexico City a hard city to decipher. The street music I had found so far had been an exercise in quality over quantity, so hearing the musical tones amid the street sounds and conversations drew me in like some kind of space ray beaming me towards the mother ship.

The sounds were close, but I couldn't see their source. A number of times in this city the music I heard on the street turned out to be amplified recordings. Stores and restaurants use recorded music to attract attention. So I was beginning to suspect I had been tricked by modern technology, again. I was about to give up when I walked around the back of one of the vender's stalls and three young children were blowing on the toy horns that would appear throughout the next couple of days. Actually very much more musical than simply party horns, each horn played a different note of a chord. As the children each blew their own note, collectively their three pitches combined into a Philip Glass-like minimal composition of chord tones spaced out in an ever changing pattern of combinations. It was street music in its purest sense, if John Cage had been there he would have heard the construction sounds, talking, shouting, car horns, and these three young maestros as one grand symphony of the purest music of all, music uncontrolled by human intervention and beautiful in its infinitely changing immersive natural-ness.

In some ways it was the best music I could have found at that moment because of its complete purity of inspiration and total expression of joy. But what was most arresting to me was the stark contrast between this highly abstract musical expression made in complete innocence against the walk down Calle Madero amid a cacophony of generic commercialism. The sound of play, the sounds of fun, the sounds of three young friends doing something together and exploring what it was like, perhaps for the first time, to make a sound that carries over the din of everything else and to understand even in a small way that we as individuals have the opportunity to make a statement that can be heard, that can attract attention and provoke thought that reaches out from us and touches others. Well over a couple of hundred people were within the sound of these children's three note melody perhaps. Part of the beauty was that the power of this circumstance was used by these unknowing performers for something as fundamentally valuable as simply expressing joy. Music should be this.

I stood for a time, listening, and soaking it in. It is one of those scenes that will remain vivid in my internal memory-scope. Soon, the children's music slowed down, silences between notes became longer and one after another they put down the horns and moved on to something else.

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The Cathedral

The sun can be a bit strong here, in the afternoon. Not a deep, intense desert baking, but there's definitely that altitude thing. Just a little higher, just a little more vivid, let's say. In the middle of the day, even in the early fall, it was getting hot. Pealing off layers helps, but I was still looking for some shade.

I had been walking east through the Centro Histórico, past the street hawkers and street performers, past the restaurants and clothing shops and into a vast expense of concrete and stone, the Zócalo, the center of the city. One very large stone fired heating pad. But today it was filled with two-story high bleachers and the trusses and speaker stacks of an enormous sound system. Tomorrow was Independence Day Eve and the final preparations were being made for the celebration, complete with an appearance by the President on the balcony of the National Palace.

I came to Mexico City with a blank slate. Improvise. That was the plan. But I was looking forward to seeing the Zócalo. I had read of its immensity, how there were clusters of people, street performers, musicians, a vast expanse of activity. But instead I saw the framework for a spectacular pageant. I'd worked enough rock concerts to know the drill and in the heat and the sonic blast tests of the sound system, I really was looking for somewhere to regroup

A side door beckoned. Dark and shady, a cold stone archway. I walked through a gate in an iron fence and stepped through the doorway.

The Metropolitan Cathedral and Tabernacle form the northern façade of the square. The Cathedral was built in sections between 1573 and 1813 and is the largest cathedral in the Americas. The Tabernacle was built during the Baroque period, 1749- 1760. Without intention I had entered the eastern entrance to the Tabernacle.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I realized I had crossed a threshold into another world. In the distance ahead of me, I could see a priest and a congregation engaged in a religious ceremony. I wanted to investigate the space and learn something of the architecture but with the ceremony going on, I felt like an intruder and distraction. I stood quietly in the corner, watching and listening for a time. It was so dark I was not able to seen details of the building. The ceremony continued in the distance, suspended lighting setting off the scene in stark contrast as if the congregation were floating across a dark night sky. Without the context of space for reference, the whole thing seemed very supernatural as if I had fallen down into a time portal and was standing in limbo observing but completely unseen. Standing in my street clothing of the 21st century observing a modest presentation of noon Mass as it has been, continuing for more than two centuries, I was again reminded of how deep the roots of identity and community and culture are here.

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Part Five

Roma Norte.

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Improvisacion Libre

Standing on a corner, watching a scene unfold in front of me, capturing moments in time that represent something ethereal or at least beyond the surface, searching, exploring, trying to discover what is really here. That's what I like, the real thing, whatever is happening in the moment. I love recognizing the beauty and the relationships that happen in the fleeting seconds of our lives. It's a cliché but it's true, if we stop and look or listen, we will discover things about each other and ourselves that we will never know in the hurried existence we call everyday life. This is what fascinates me.

So for weeks before my time in Mexico City, I was searching the Internet looking for musicians that make music in the moment. We call that music free improvisation, or just free improv here in the States. It is a special kind of contemporary music that is performed from instant to instant without a score and usually without any leader or directives. We go on stage and start a conversation in music and collectively we arrive someplace different. In no other musical form that I know of is there as much freedom and interaction. It is all about listening to the other musicians and collaborating. It can be highly exhilarating for the performers as well as the audience.

I wanted to find free improvisation music in Mexico City. I wanted to connect with some of my hermanos or hermanas. I wanted to join my scene. In a contemporary sociological sense, I needed to seek out my tribe. But I was coming up with nothing.

I didn't believe it. In a city of over eight million people, a place where contemporary art and culture was so extensive and appreciated, I could not believe this form of contemporary music just wasn't happening there.

To be sure, it is an underground thing. And connecting with an underground movement of any kind takes some effort. But in other cities were I've made contacts, once you find one venue, or one event, you'll find flyers, people, and the scene will materialize around you. I knew I just had to find the entry point.

I arrived in Mexico City on Wednesday without a single lead. That night, in desperation, I did one last Internet search. This time a venue came up that listed concerts that had happened last year. But the artist's names and bios were still posted. Some were listed as living in Mexico City! I did a Facebook search and found Remi Álverez. Awesome! I was as good as in!

"Hi Remi, I'm a free improv musician visiting Mexico City for the weekend and hoped to hear a concert. Are you possibly performing this weekend? I'd love to attend."

Within an hour he answered me. "We perform tomorrow, Thursday, at 21 hours. Bucareli 69 in the city."

And so my music day was complete. Opera in the afternoon, dinner with my flute playing friend, and an edgy experimental concert that night! Complete awesomeness.

From the Zócalo I headed west into the darkened streets. The sounds of thousands of voices in the square faded away. The storefronts were covered with metal roll down shutters. Occasionally a car would drive past. It was quiet with few people on the street. The distances here are longer than they look on the map. I kept checking my phone to see how much farther.

The Avenida Bucareli was built in the late 18th century and named after the viceroy of New Spain, Antonio María de Bucareli y Ursúa. It now divides the Centro Histórico on the east from the Colonia Juárez on the west.

I was standing on the sidewalk at the place my phone told me I should be. There was a café and I stepped inside. No stage, no place for musicians to perform, just tables, chairs, the counter. "Musica esta noche?" I asked. Immediately the guy at the door jumped into English. "No, there's a poetry reading tonight," he said. I hesitated. "No musica?" I repeated. This time he said, "Try next door." "Gracias!" And I left.

I walked next door but all that was there was a blank closed door with no sign. I kept heading towards the next door after that, but he stopped me. "This," he said. I saw a buzzer and pressed it. A moment later, a woman came to the door and let me in. "Concierto?" she asked. "Si."

"Cuanto questa," I asked. "Cien," she replied. I gave her the money and she pointed to some chairs. "Wait here," she said.

After my long walk, I had arrived about 10 minutes before the scheduled start time, but I was the first person there. After awhile, other people were arriving, buying drinks at the bar, and hanging out. In the lobby, a grand piano was suspended on wires about three feet off the floor. I wanted to play it, but it was roped off, don't get too close, we don't know how long it will hang there on those metal wires.

At one point, as I was standing and waiting, Remi walked in. He recognized me as the only Americano in the place and said "Hi, thanks for coming!" and headed in to get set up. At about 10pm the band was ready and the woman who was selling the tickets said we could all go in now.

The concert was totally as cool as I hoped it would be and totally fulfilled on their name, Géiser. It was a quartet consisting of Remi Álverez on flute and tenor saxophone, Iñigo Barandarian on guitar with lots of pedals, Gibrán Andrade on drums, and Carlos Alegre on amplified and processed violin.

The music was intense, sophisticated, and highly varied. It was an impressive two sets. I particularly enjoyed their use of wide dynamic contrasts. This is not that easy to do in an ensemble larger than a duo. Everyone has to be really listening and paying attention. There's a sixth sense in play between the members of a really good ensemble and that was clearly happening here that night. It was powerful, bold, highly energetic as well as subtle passages that were like whispers, light, and perfectly controlled.

At the end of the night I was thoroughly inspired and exhilarated. Two really amazing musical experiences in one day! The opera had been so elegant, and finely detailed, and the performance and venue had been captivating, Remi's group was intense, spontaneous, and amazingly creative. Music had surrounded me, lifted me up, held me in a sense of suspended reality – like the piano in the lobby.

Just as I had yelled "Bravo" at the opera, I talked with Remi and the other musicians as best as I could. Thank you, Gracias!, very cool! They smiled and laughed when I told them they were "awesome!" But it was true. They were. And it really was awe inspiring to see just how much joy, spirit, and maybe even hope could be gained from music performed from the heart and with a sincere dedication to achieving a high level of musical expressivity. That's what art is really about. And that's what each of us, in whatever medium we choose to work in, can be inspired to do. Performances, exhibitions, readings, they share a collective energy and give us all a jolt of inspiration to keep working, keep pushing, keep searching for ways to realize our vision and share it with the world.

Awesomeness, indeed.

__________

Groceries?

For two days I didn't even have to think about food. Every restaurant where I happened to walk in and sit down, prepared an incredibly delicious meal for me. Often served with the highest level of care and service and always with a friendly, neighborly attitude. Even with my completely lame language skills, navigating a restaurant and ordering food was made totally less awkward by the welcoming attitude of the waiter or waitress. Eating in Mexico City was so easy!

But at some point I started to wonder, where would I buy food if I lived here? For a couple of days I had roamed the Colonias around my apartment and had never seen a proper grocery or super market. I understand the issue. Real grocery stores are always rare in the high rent real estate of any city. New York's solution, the neighborhood bodega, is a better solution than most. But in so many metropolitan areas, finding food in its natural, unprocessed form can be difficult or impossible.

So it wasn't a surprise to find nothing but convenience stores. There probably are at least a million. Often there is one on every block and sometimes one at each end. But they all carry the same things. Lots of cold drinks, candy, and a few household items. Buried in a far corner somewhere there might be a rack of actual food items – cans of beans, maybe a bag of rice, some baby food. It's a pretty thin selection with open spaces on the shelf that just never have any product on them. Where do people buy real food? For the first couple of days, I did not know.

With so many really excellent restaurants and an abundance of delicious street food, why cook? Well, I never did cook for myself. The apartment's stove went completely unused during my stay. And maybe that's just how I would have lived if I took up permanent residence.

On Friday, as I was walking much further south into Roma, as I was heading back home I walked past a real super market. Wow, this is the place, the mother lode. I had to go in. Grabbing a basket inside the door I started exploring what was available. I hoped to find some interesting fruit drinks and if I could grab some pastries, that would be a total win.

I walked past the meat cases and cruised through the aisles. It's always fun to read the brand names, look at the packaging, and discover the products that are just nothing like the what's available at home. There was so much more variety of bottled water and fruit drinks here. And bottled still water came in a wide variety of sizes all the way up to the large jugs that go into the top of stand alone dispensers.

"Lemon y Nada" caught my eye, in part due to being able to understand the words. That's exactly what I was looking for. Sparkling water, lemon and nothing else. Amazing! Somebody made a product just for me. Now why don't we have this home, Mr. Coke a Cola product man? That I don't understand.

Score one.

Next, pastries. The bakery items were at the far corner of the store and I stocked up on some chocolate croissants, my downfall indeed. You use a tray and tongs to extract your selections from the cases and take them to the counter. A woman wrapped each of my selections in plastic, carefully and with the speed and expertise of someone who has done this professionally, she completely avoided touching the bakery goods directly, and put them in a bag for me.

This was the final piece I needed. Great restaurants with friendly people and awesome food nearby, a sunny apartment, amazing architecture as a backdrop to some incredible street scenes, and now a source for those essentials like sparkling water and croissants! I could be very happy here for a very long time, think you!

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Part Six

Condessa.

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Parque México

I'm walking south through Roma Norte. The atmosphere on the street is changing. The sidewalks grow narrower, there's more trees, flowers, palms, thick clusters of greens give the blocks a feeling of a small town, near the mountains, or the coast perhaps. The architecture is more consistently in the Porfirian style, the combination of Mediterranean and Moorish influences in shades of faded pastel yellows, pinks, browns, and aqua marines. The scenes are charmingly serene, the vibe is laid back even. It all comes together to create an artsy feel with boutiques and a few art galleries hidden away down streets dripping with vegetation. I had entered Colonia Condessa.

On Avenida Amsterdam, a narrow lane that curves through a residential neighborhood west of the Parque México, I noticed a hand written signboard in the center of the sidewalk. "CAARMELA – a curated collection of vintage, modern, and recycled fashión" it said, in English, with a tiny heart dotting the i. A small storefront, walls and ceiling painted pink, and a selection of clothing hanging on simple minimalist racks. Fabrics and colors gracefully draping down from wooden hangers. Looking up into the trees, four ornate Victorian birdcages, empty, painted white, and hanging in the branches with purple ribbons. It was a fanciful moment, a glimpse into a vision that was joyously playful and sensitively beautiful.

In scenes like this, moments of pure individual expression were happening everywhere, in the restaurants, the parks, the street music, the murals and graffiti, the architecture, and fashion. This sensibility extended to something as simple as the bright red plastic suspended over a market that cast everything in a warm red-orange glow. Little microcosms, artifacts of a vision beyond the ordinary, and a modern, almost minimalist, aesthetic, became moments of renewal and inspiration to me as I walked past countless people hanging out, working, or on their way from one place to another. The more often I discovered places like Caarmela, the more I felt connected, informed, able to begin to understand the ballet and opera that I was becoming a part of and that was playing out in three-dimensions and multiple time frames all around me.

I turned a corner and the street opened onto the grand Parque México. I stopped and absorbed the moment. On my left, the Foro Lindbergh, a colonnade in an ancient Greek-Roman style surrounded a large paved space where three or four games of soccer were taking place simultaneously. Children and adults, together, running left and right pursuing or provoking some action. Right in front of me, behind a row of girls sitting on a ledge watching, a group of younger boys were playing. In the universal style of improvised street games, they had designated a small stairway at the end of the ledge as their goal and a lot of the action happened right before our eyes.

Within the sounds of the games, everyone talking or cheering, was the sound of guitar music, blended in, perfectly mixed as if it were a movie soundtrack. I had stepped into a short cinéma vérité film and my view morphed into an 8mm frame. I imagined dialogues and relationships connecting to an underlying plot line.

The girls, watching their boyfriends in the soccer games were telling stories, reminiscing of pervious lovers, and speculating of hopes and dreams to come. A woman sat on the ledge of a fountain, the water easily flowing from a single font into a cool inviting pool. She leaned back, bare legs extending from a dark dress, reading a book. Her long dark hair flowing gently in the breeze. Who is she, I wondered, what is her name, does she spend time here often, alone?

The camera paned out reframing relationships, bathing everything in the saturated colors of Kodachrome. I rested for awhile on a bench, letting the plot develop, taking in the changing perspectives as the soccer players moved across the forum, a vender sold snacks, people walked across the frame, sometimes pausing to listen or look or become part of the tableau for a few moments.

The music drew more and more of my focus, a long audio cross fade between the complex mix of the soundtrack to a single guitarist, visible on the other side of the street playing against the backdrop of the trees and plantings of one of the oldest parks in the city.

Crossing Avenida Michoacán, I stood and listened for a few moments.

He was dressed in black, using his right foot sideways on the sidewalk as a brace to elevate his left leg in the traditional classical form. It is a measure of my place on the guitar scale that I never felt comfortable playing that way. As a point of entry, the position alone identifies the player's serious intent. So pay attention.

"Quanta cuesta este CD?" I asked. "Cinquenta," he replied. The universal price of just about everything on the street. You now, in the states when someone wants to sell you their CD on the street, it's always $10. Not that I'm against anyone of my crew trying to make a living with their music. We all recognize it's damn near impossible. So chip in the ten or go without. I get it. But 50 pesos is about two and a half dollars. I know the price of the materials. The guy's barely making anything. I feel like I should have bought ten of them. That would have been the right thing to do.

Sometimes this currency exchange thing freaks me out. In my head I have a little matrix of pesos to dollars. I think I have it in hand and then something like this comes along that is so far outside the realm of what would seem logical, that I just pay it and think about it later. It's then that I realize I just got a private ride in an Uber for less than two dollars. Or I got a recording of some really outstanding serious classical guitar music for barely nothing. The CD contains really strong performances of J. S. Bach, Robert Schumann, Albeniz, _and_ three original compositions! Maybe it's a good thing I don't do the math in my head, its truly embarrassing to even agree to be a part of a deal like that.

People really can play the guitar here. That's certain. Clarity of technique, refined choice of repertoire, a sense of dedication to the art. In the North American cities where I have collected street music, it's all about rock. And let me be perfectly clear, I've heard some great playing, especially in California! But that's as much about the vocal, and the posturing, as the guitar playing. I'm not dissing rock but any guitarist will admit there's a hierarchy of guitar skills and this classical stuff is up at the top.

I stood and listened, soaking it up. For me, this was probably the finest playing I have heard on the street, ever. And I'm talking New York, New Orleans, San Francisco. This was an entirely different level, and the cinematic quality of the setting only enhanced the magic of the moment.

A few people walked by, another guy stopped to listen for a few seconds. It hurts to say it but I suspect hardly anyone was paying attention because this was just too ordinary, as incredible as that seems. Guitar dude playing Rodrigo in the park on Saturday afternoon. Yeah that happens here.

Beautiful, really.

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Fuente de Cibeles

It should be pretty clear by now that my approach to street photography is, shall we say, improvisational. I have a few target locations that I plan out ahead of time but the trajectory is never planned. In the back of my mind I am aiming for a certain neighborhood or intersection that I hope will provide some inspiring images. But the exact path, the streets and intersections along the way are always up for embellishment. If something looks promising on a side street, I'm going there, and then correcting the route at the next corner.

One of my earliest expeditions was to head south into Roma Norte and try to learn if that area had a different vibe from Juarez, where I was staying.

As I crossed the Avenida Chapultepec, almost immediately, it felt different. Small shops, more trees and eventually a warren of narrow curving roads with vegetation in every direction. It was serene, beautiful, architecturally inspiring, and there were a lot of cool looking people around, usually hanging out near restaurants or enjoying a few moments with friends.

Walking south on Medellín, space suddenly opens up at a roundabout in the same place carriageways of the Third Countess of Miravalle had intersected in the 19th century. Now, four streets converge with shops and restaurants lining the buildings around the perimeter. In the center, is a plaza with benches, chairs, and the fountain, a replica of the Fuente de Cibeles in Madrid.

Madrid's original dates from the late 1700s and it is a suitably Baroque confection depicting the Roman goddess of fertility standing in a carriage pulled by two lions. In 1980, Spanish immigrants to Mexico donated this copy of the Spanish fountain to the city.

When I stepped into the plaza, the whole feel of the neighborhood opened up. There was space to look at the scene as a whole, to take a broader sweep of the people and the architecture. It was possible to look across the plaza and catch a glimpse of what was going on in several restaurants and to connect with the flow of people moving through the space. There were enough people coming and going, relaxing, and talking with friends that I started to feel like I fit into the landscape.

I ended returning to shoot some video on my last day because the place just felt very much like a hangout to me. I enjoyed being there, watching, filming, and talking to an expat couple I met who had recently moved nearby to set up a graphic design shop.

The city is overwhelming. Large, complex, spread out. I knew I could never take it all in. Instead I hoped to find a few places that embraced me, places that felt like they were my place, at least somewhat. Places that expanded my sense of home.

It was a groovy place.

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Wandering

I had been wandering, rambling, as when my students start looking at their phones, or eyeing the door. And I try to tell them this is not extraneous information. What's the value of doing music without the backstory, the context, the development? An idea without a patina isn't worth looking at. There's no life there, no depth, no real experience. No one wants a pristine artistic expression. It's just boring.

Each day, one street corner leads to another, decisions made with and without purpose, sometimes even randomly. I had no intention of catching the Hot Wheels club meet-up. I didn't even know it existed. But that single experience was worth a whole series of days spent searching the Internet for inspiration.

I came to CDMX to crack open a book of real living and it fulfilled in every way.

Travel is not about escape. But it is often an occasion for discovery. It's hard to see past the recurring patterns of my life at home, to actually even notice what needs to be reconsidered or completely replaced with something new. Everything's so busy that there's no time. But sitting on my balcony, looking out over the rooftops, that's really all it takes to realize the context and motivation behind all this, the preservation and development of art and culture, the exploration of new ideas that become functional ventures and actually employ people, this stuff happens when there's freedom. Freedom to stop and ponder, freedom to imagine, freedom to be unconstrained.

Sure this city has problems, but culture is thriving, the arts are exploding, and new ideas and opportunities are rising to the surface in every direction. At the same time, there is such a strong connection and appreciation for heritage and identity. The countless museums, the multiple layers of authentic architecture, the continuum of cuisine evolving in new ways yet rooted in the traditional cooking of indigenous regions. This is such a vital, lively place. Freedom is working here. I saw it on the faces of the men and women and children, I heard it in the melodies and rhythms of the music, I saw it everyday in the activity and innovation of street vendors, street food stalls, galleries, and boutiques. Late in the evening of my last night in the city, I was walking back from the plaza around the Fuente de Cibeles where I had been shooting raw video footage for a multimedia concert later in the year.

It was dark, nearly every storefront was closed. I walked past a furniture upholstery shop I had past earlier in the day. Two men, the same I had seen this morning, we working under bare light bulbs, stretching the fabric over a sofa and stapling it in place. Early in the morning, as I headed out each day, I would pass men pushing or pulling their carts down the street, on the way to their street corner, in preparation for the day's work selling fruit or beverages. Late in the evening I would see them returning home, dragging the cart with them. Day after day.

Freedom is the opportunity we all have to prove that each of us is important, that we all have a unique and important identity. Each day we prove this. It is through each of us that this ongoing adventure we call art and life, culture and community has meaning and value and that it will endure and grow, expand and develop. That new ideas will be made real by the work of individuals, late into the night and early in the morning.

Looking out over Mexico City from the privilege of a fifth floor balcony it is remarkable how powerful the thrust of freedom is. It is in these faces and these works that freedom maintains.

If there has been a single take away from my time immersed in the culture of Mexico City, it is this. The life, art, culture, and identity of this place is a vast, complex array of history and styles, the past, the present, and a striving for the future, standing juxtaposed, one next to the other, preserved in their own time yet standing together now in our time. In the flyover shot I see from the airline window as we ascend out of Benito Juárez airport, the roofs and streets, people and cars are simultaneously together and separate. A city this size will always be a bundle of identities and reference points. It is a moment indelibly imprinted on my meory.

It had been a grand adventure, many photos were taken, many exciting discoveries were made, and I had envisioned the possibilities of at least three or four alternate simultaneous realities that continue to inspire and amaze me. It was the colors, the sounds, the slow graceful dance moves, the light making patterns on the ground, the soups, the filtered pearlescent light of the plastic roofed market, and the sound of dance music filtering back through the park. But once again, more than anything else, it was the people I met that made me feel welcome and included, and expressed a gentle sense of warmth that made everything take on an entirely new sense of what it means to be a part of a community. More than anything else, this is what I learned in Mexico City. A gentle unity. Call it "Bienvenidos."

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Afterword

This is hard. I left about 45 hours before the earthquake hit. Texts, Facebook messages, trying to contact the two people I really knew there. "Are you OK? I just heard about the earthquake." I waited. I tried writing an email, texting a different phone number. And I waited. It seemed like a very long time. Finally that evening I heard back. The power had been out for 6 hours but it just came back on. I'm OK, we're OK. Raphael, whose apartment I stayed in, said he couldn't get to his building but he could see it was still standing.

The news reports and images. It was painful. To me the worst is when this kind of thing hits a school. This just shouldn't happen to children. Of all the buildings we need to do right, it's schools. I realize now after having been there, the buildings put up in the 40s, 50s, and 60s were build not so great. And the 1985 hadn't happened yet so before that, no one really had any idea what something really bad would do to buildings constructed the old way. I understand that back then it might be possible to rationalize construction techniques based on a complete lack of information or experience. But once 1985 hit, it just seems to me to be beyond comprehension that places like schools (and hospitals) are not built to withstand anything. I don't really care about the economics of it. Figure it out.

Schools full of kids need to be built to survive anything.

Back at the beginning, in those first few minutes in the terminal, when I finally found an ATM that was not out of cash, I withdrew 2,000 pesos, about $100 US dollars. Immediately I wondered how long would that cash last. I had no way of knowing.

Pretty long, it turns out. Between being able to use my credit card for nearly everything, and the fact that incidentals on the street and in the markets are shockingly inexpensive, about 100 in US dollars lasted me five days.

I'm heading back to the States tomorrow. Thank you for the good food, I told him in broken, stuttering Spanish. Gracias. He smiled, and said "Bienvenido a mi casa." On more than one occasion, when I was tired and hungry, my first meal and my last in Mexico City, a sort of bookends theme of life as if it were a sonata-allegro form, he had taken care of me when I was tired and hungry after a day of shooting on the street. Graciously understanding of my language inabilities, and tolerant of my incomplete sentences demanding "dos mas" tacos, forgetting the "por favor" until moments later, when I called it out after him. He turned and gave me a thumbs up as if to say, "it's cool dude, I got ya covered."

The restaurant, El Pialadero de Guadalajara, at the end opposite end of the block from my apartment gave me my first dinner in Mexico City and it was incredible rich and delicious. What is your specialty, I said at the time, undoubtedly mispronouncing everything. But he managed to decipher my ineptness and soon dinner arrived. Warm corn tortillas wrapped in a red cloth, a creamy red sauce, green sauce, grilled onions. And at the center a bowl of shredded beef in a magical sauce of indescribable flavors. The first one I assembled, I slathered on the red sauce. It looks so creamy! After a couple of bites, all of a sudden I was on fire. Actually it was more like an explosion! I thought I could handle hot food but this took my breath away. Thank God for the Coke I ordered, I needed something to put out the fire! I learned my lesson, that's for sure. Go easy on the red stuff until you check it out. Once recovered, I started again. Number two went much easier. I could handle more heat. So I stepped it up some more until there was a nice burn, an entire rock concert of flavor, and then there was nothing left. Muchas gracias! Esta muy bien!

In the car on the way back to the airport, I revisited again those first fleeting images of the city I had seen just a few days earlier. A scrolling series of first impressions, now passing in reverse order, like an audio tape being in rewind. What impressions will remain, what will formulate the next steps of my life, what will all this mean in a few days, months, or years ahead?

Colors swirling, shapes coming in and out of focus, sounds in the distance, the intensity of the hearts and minds that have touched me here. Where am I going, anyway? What will I see, what will it mean to me, will I be able to understand something, anything at all?

What I am most concerned about is that I will go somewhere and completely miss the point, just flat out not comprehend what is going on around me and why, what the meaning of life in this place is, what people value and what strive for.

The car slows, turns towards the departures ramp. The cinema vérité outside my window slows to a stop, rewound.

I came to Mexico City to discover for myself, for real, the true heart and soul of our brothers and sisters on the other side of an artificial line that seems to separate us so impenetrably. I needed to discover for myself what is true of this place that is so near, yet held so distant and incomprehensible by preconceptions and fear. I wanted to know the reality, not the opinions or posturing of noisy loud people with powerful microphones. I wanted to forge my own vision that reflects what really happened, what I really saw and experienced, for myself, in fact.

I open the door, the first of many I shall pass through on my journey home. Suddenly it hits me: If we are separated by doors, one or many, or see each other only through windows, "a glass, darkly;" if we can not reach out and touch a hand, look into eyes clearly, and actually be together in one space, it's obvious, isn't it?

Sometimes a takes a lot to push open a door or raise the window, but let's do it. How else will we ever know what's really there?

__________

A Note of Thanks

Thank you for reading my book. If you enjoyed or were inspired maybe, won't you please take a moment to leave me a review at your favorite retailer? And I hope you'll stay in touch. Share your thoughts about creativity and what works for you. I look forward to hearing your ideas!

James Hegarty

www.JimHegarty.com

www.TheCreativeEdgeBooks.com

www.Facebook.com/TheCreativeEdgeBooks

twitter.com/JamesHegarty

