Fading frontera friendship

Border Field State Park is an expansive estuary in California's southwestern-most corner, butting up against friend 'n' foe Mexico in an unlikely juxtaposition. The American side is barren, all empty beach and nubby ice plants, with a single vigilant Border Patrol jeep keeping close watch on the contested land from a meager perch near the park's main car lot. The Mexican side, or Playas de Tijuana, is all action, clumps of families clustered on blankets basking in the temperate sun, boisterous vendors offering up mango-sticks, carved coconuts, chicharrones, and their female accomplices hawking silver bangles and woven anklets. Mariachi and nortena music blares in the background from a line of beach-side establishments, hugging the perimeter of Tijuana's bull-fighting ring.

The reason why I know what the Mexican side looks and sounds like, is because in these remaining few meters before land meets sea on the U.S.-Mexico border, the dense double-paned and barbed-wired wall tapers into a series of wooden poles (see the image above). Notice they look like unkempt telephone poles, spaced to leave a foot or two of inviting room to accommodate sneaky border-crossing or mango sales (to help give the dry U.S. side some sustenance!).

When I was there just a few months back, a few men crossed from Tijuana to the U.S. side for a 'friendly' football game as soon as the border patrol momentarily drove off. They were engaging and sweet, but knew to dart back to Mexico when the American jeep returned. A couple lay blankets on opposite sides of the border to spend precious time together, peering between and even touching across the poles. In contrast, the rest of the border resembles a minefield of stoic aluminum barriers, over ten-feet tall, topped with vicious barbs.

The beachy Border Field State Park is known as "Friendship Park," but it's a far cry from anything its name would denote. Recent efforts to defend the few meters of open(ish) space have failed, and the last remaining openness of California's western border will soon transform into the impenetrable barricades and walls known elsewhere in the state. Proponents of the expanded border wall cite ecological preservation and increase safety, while opponents decry the development as punitive political tool, and one that will deter communication and ultimately hurt friendly relations between the U.S. and Mexico.

See the recent NY Times article for a quick national update, and the San Diego Union-Tribune for more info on pro/con arguments.

Suffice to say, I love being able to buy a mango on a stick in this land of friendship.

The Right to the City

"Everywhere, the state is at war with those who it rules"

Boston's like a frickin horn of plenty when it comes to intellectual life. Last week I decided to start taking advantage of the endless talks, lectures, colloquia, free/cheap films, lessons and tours offered in this city of schools. So I found myself watching a talk on The Right to the City, sponsored by MIT's Visual Arts Program , and running wild with Henri LeFebvre, generously framed by scholars/practitioners Philippe Rekacewicz and Shuddhabrata Sengupta.

I couldn't stay for the full Q&A, but needless to say the presentations were top notch - Rekacewicz's radical cartography particularly shined in his poignant reminder of map-making as an imaginative rendering of perspective and power struggles rather than unbiased, immutable truth-telling, as well as his wry discussion of the privatization of airports (autonomous authoritarian zones, no less, whose public spaces have been manipulated into oblivion by the encroaching free trade of Duty Free). Interesting to note that these same "free" commercial zones tend to obscure the pervasive surveillance and policing that constitutes our airports, making for a telling paradox of our obligation to consume versus our lack of right to do much else.

Sangupta, a founder of SARAI , made the night entirely worth it, however, with his intervention on "Bodies, Biographies and Bombs." I'd love a copy of the talk, although the VAP (see link above) should have the talk recorded for those interested. He's a poetic writer and confident speaker, all of which made for a captivating talk that began with Galton's visual archive of the "homo criminalis", moved into the Delhi police force's "identikit" recognition system (which helps image criminal faces using an archive of physical features taken from police officers), and then concluded with the consequences of images of violence in the media, and the resulting anxiety "fatigue".

The entire talk was riveting, but one of the ideas I keep turning over in my mind is what Sangupta referred to as a "pornography of quantity" in the news, or the obsession with (and fetish for?) numbers associated with violent crimes and acts of terrorism. It is the numbers that pull in our fascination, and his assessment of the September 13, 2008, bombs in Delhi drew sharp parallels with (obviously) the U.S. 9/11, and, for me, the rising murders on the U.S./Mexico border. Juarez isn't the only city with killings spiralling upwards like a lotto of souls, Tijuana's got its own share and the media's fascinated .

Sangupta derided this news porno as more degrading and objectifying than any of the usual erotic acrobatics we'd usually associate with the term, an abuse of bodies and flesh for ratings. What happens to life when we render it news clip and pull quote? What happens to life when we mediate it, photograph it, copy it and re-tell it in the name of nationalism and security?

Both talks gestured towards the schema we use in our rhetoric to achieve certainty, and the ruptures that occur when the facts don't always fit the frame. In pursuing more of Sangupta's work, I found a wonderful piece on borders - as applicable to the U.S./Mexico division I know so well as to the India/Pakistan border he refers to. It's yet another critique of the violence that these schema produce, of how so many of what we think of as rights and liberties are so dependent on just a line in the sand.

"The border is the mark on the ground which tells you that wherever you are on earth, hell begins close to home. And you are never far from a border. It doesn't matter in which city, continent or country you are in, the border seeks you out in the end."

Loving to make music

I'm not a huge fan of mash-ups...it was a fad generated to make a fuss over what DJing has always been about - taking incongruent sounds and making them work, extending a beat and mixing old and new, new and new, fast and slow, you get my point. That's not to say I don't appreciate a good extended mix when I hear one, and in the post z-trip era it's nice to hear some quality collaged soundwork coming out. Check Daedalus if you can, who's been a prolific producer for years and has recently come out with a really solid, all-around album, Love to Make Music To. The link will take you to a particularly bizarre story - gotta love world's fair injuries and Frankensteinian transformations in the liner notes.

My fave track is "My Beau", probably because it makes me feel better to know that one of the defining tracks of my high school 'big booty ho' days is not only appreciated by a musician i greatly respect, but that he has even remixed it with a tweaked out bassline, making it sound more aaliyah than 2 live crew. Not that there's anything wrong with some Luke, but check it:

about MIT...

Okay, the Soulja Boy dance craze is so 2007, but I was entertained to see the MIT version on youtube today while searching for a mysterious and still to-be-found MIT dance club (yes, I went there...):

Who knew lab coats could move so well?