Stranger with You: Fresh from the Hut

Does this happen elsewhere now, too? In Mexico City, Pizza Hut pizza comes with a little sprig of rosemary in the box, "to signify freshness," and Pizza Hut's commitment to it. The rosemary tastes more or less exactly like the cardboard box it comes in. Also included with the pizza is a tiny plastic bag containing three tomato seeds and an equally tiny booklet about how to grow your own tomatoes.

Stranger with You: Cultural Expatriation

What is the deal with "Downtown Abbey" that everyone's talking about and why does Steve Inskeep sound like he's saying "Doughton Abbey" when he mentions it?

Stranger with You: Outer Space Awaited

Sometimes I think that my roommates are annoyingly weird, but then I remember that I'm a foreigner, I own a typewriter, and I spend all day listening to recordings of Glenn Gould played at high volumes.

Stranger with You: A Year in Mexico

Today I've been in Mexico for a year. I don't know what happened. Having lived my entire life in temperate climates, I have serious trouble noticing time pass here, because there are basically no seasons.

I had been thinking that this blog should have more entries on "life in Mexico," or something like that. But I prefer the imaginary description of my life in the D.F. that I received in an email from a friend in New York:

...Avi, who is hiding in a bunker while Mexican drug lords shoot there [sic] six shooter revolvers, one in each hand pointed sky high, wearing sombraros [sic] and ponchos.

So I guess this could also be filed in an "Antiquariana" post about ye olde Mexico, which I suppose many people imagine to have looked like this:

Stranger with You: Permanent Horoscopes

The horoscope on the matchbox tells me that because I am a Scorpio, "Today your thought is unaware and tends to use evasive or misleading tactics in communication." Then again, it said that yesterday too.

Stranger with You: I Looked for the Hamster in the Chevrolet

Over a year and a half ago, while doing some work for the magazine n+1 in Brooklyn, I read a short story by Juan Villoro called 'Among Friends' in which a Mexico City detective, who is questioning a local screen writer about the kidnapping of an American journalist from an Oxxo in the Distrito Federal, constantly makes statements such as “This is pure Buñuel, God damn it!”

The claim that Mexico City is a surreal landscape is a popular one, and not just in literature. Several months ago I was in a meeting with a lawyer here when he gestured out the window excitedly, in relation to what I can't remember. "This is a surrealist city!" he insisted. "You could look out that window and see an elephant walking through the courtyard!"

I never found these assertions all that convincing. But then today I saw a man who looked like a body double for the ambassador from the Republic of Miranda in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie while walking to the metro.

Stranger with You: One and a Half Episodes

Someone explains to me how this happens, because it's happened to me before.

I have seen the show Two and a Half Men exactly one time in my entire life. It was four months ago, in Guadalajara, at a friend's house. In that particular episode, the hard-living best friend of Charlie Sheen's character (played by Emilio Estevez) had just died; Charlie Sheen's character is worried about his own mortality, and the following joke is made during a funeral in a dream sequence:

  Emilio Estevez: Nice turnout.
  Charlie Sheen:  Yeah, standing room only.
  Emilio Estevez: Goes to show you. Give the people what they want...
  Charlie Sheen:  You mean the open bar, right?

Today, on my seventh day at a new apartment, my roommate turned on the TV in the living room and I heard the following dialogue:

  Voice of Emilio Estevez: Give the people what they want...
  Voice of Charlie Sheen:  You mean the open bar, right?
  Voice of Emilio Estevez: Sure.

Stranger with You: Coyotes in the Burg

During the first week of September I had to go back to New York unexpectedly. I took the L train out to Brooklyn to have dinner with a friend. The first thing I saw when I stepped out at the Graham Avenue stop was a shiny new restaurant called Mesa Coyoacan. It had a sign featuring howling coyotes. This was very strange. Coyoacan is a leafy upper middle class neighborhood in the southern part of the Distrito Federal that used to be a separate city. Diego Rivera and Freida Kahlo lived there. It would be like if you went to Mexico City from New York and the first thing you saw was a restaurant called The Park Slope Table.

Does this mean Mexico City is trendy now?

Stranger with You: That New Deck Smell

Once when I was working at Vice, Pat O'Dell explained to us why he called his skateboarding show Epicly Later'd, but now I forget what he said. I think it was just two words he and his friends used all the time: "epic" for "cool" and "later" for "not cool."

 

That theory seems to be supported by the fact that Hollister, purveyors of fake South California surfing lifestyle equipment, have called their new dude-perfume "The Epic Hollister Cologne." I was like totally blown away when I saw an ad for this in Mexico City the other day.

For a piercing cultural criticism of Hollister's epic/later new Manhattan flagship store, the phenomenon of immersive retail, and more reasons why I will probably never go to California, see young Molly Young's piece in the current Believer. Here's the best line:

"In an era of T9 input, text messages begun with I would automatically fill in mstoned."

Stranger with You: The Accountants Have Computed

The pace of life is more relaxed in Mexico. That means it takes fifteen minutes to pay for a cup of coffee. Maybe this will change as they open more Starbucks franchises.

Stranger with You: Return of the Space Cowboy

I am sitting at my kitchen table and someone in the courtyard is drunkenly singing "Like a Stone." In Mexico City, you hear a lot of pop music that isn't played publicly in New York City anymore. Audioslave is a good example. I've had several unexpected chances to reacquaint myself with their early-2000s hits. Jamiroquai is another. I've heard more Jamiroquai during the last two months than I had during the previous five years in New York. In Mexico City it is perfectly acceptable to play "Cosmic Girl" at a party, bar, cafe, or from your car stereo as you cruise Avenida Insurgentes with the windows  rolled down. That kind of thing doesn't happen often in New York. To give another example: when was the last time you and your buddies were hanging around drinking beer and someone played three songs in a row by Massive Attack? Here it's common.

Stranger with You: Bald Eagles in Mexico

My (Mexican) roommate has a mug that appears to be from Lake Tahoe, in the US Sierra Nevada. It features a somewhat cartoonish painting of a Bald Eagle's head and a block of English text which informs us that "despite its majestic appearance, the Bald Eagle is primarily a scavenger and thinks nothing of stealing food from other birds of prey or taking advantage of carrion…"

It was a surprising way for a coffee mug from the US to present the national bird. Does the Lake Tahoe tourist board just need to hire a new design team? Or was the mug planted at a gift shop by some aging hippie who got a job there in order to disperse subversive messages about American identity amongst unwitting tourists? Or do  all nationalistic artifacts begin to corrupt and degenerate when stranded for too long outside the US borders?