Frida Fever

I think Mexico City induced a sort of delirium in me. It's a fairly disorienting city in the best of scenarios, but when you've been traveling for close to three months, you're a little nervous about grad school (coming up as soon as you cross that border), and you've been through the death of your grandma and a staph infection in the process, the existing chaos of DF takes on kaleidoscopic and phantasmagorical qualities. The clowns doing entertainment on the Metro for spare change become grostesque. The smog gets into your eyes, and your subconscious.

One Mexico City personage who experienced the delirium of this city and externalized it even as she suffered it was Frida Kahlo. Some of you may have seen the recent Salma Hayek movie? Well, this year is the centennial of her birth, and Mexico City is celebrating that by capitalizing on the mounting international attention that Frida received both late in life and since her death, even when she was lesser known in Mexico than her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera. The result was a special exhibition of her art at her house in the southern Mexico City district of Coyoacán, and a huge solo show at the capital's Palacio de Bellas Artes. So me, my Stanford friend Nick and his girlfriend Desha had a Frida day once they arrived. We went to the Fine Arts Palace, and then to Frida's house (the Casa Azul, where she grew up and which she later lent to Leon Trotsky when he was in exile in DF), and then to the house that Diego and Frida shared, nearby in San Ángel.

Frida suffered in life. She was run over by a streetcar, which left her incapacitated, on and off, throughout her life. It also probably led to her early death, in 1954. She was in a lot of pain, and many of her paintings reflect on the delirium that pain and suffering can cause. The tricks they can play on our minds. Frida painted many self-portraits that showed her suffering in very novel ways. Having spent a lot of time in the US, she also reflected on popular culture and fame. Many images come to my mind now, two in particular. One: a painting of two Fridas next to each other, bound together by veins, one of which is being cut with scissors by one Frida, causing it to bleed on her white dress. Two: a painting of Dorothy Hale, a movie star who jumped to her death off the Empire State Building. Frida gave the painting to the star's mother.

Diego Rivera's murals are another iconic example of Mexico City's rich visual arts scene. Using a number of themes, which were often Marxist, Rivera painted huge scenes taking in a variety of themes, including man's and science's triumphs over nature, war and peace, fascism, death, work and leisure. Fascinating and overwhelming. Diego and Frida's relationship was one for the books. Though tempestuous, he was the love of her life, and she his.

In Mexico City, I found that I couldn't just take things in without getting intensely involved in them. This is probably because the city's monuments and sights are so wonderfully imperfect, or layered, or conflicted, and therefore quite accessible. You don't see the slickness of the Louvre, or the manicured perfection of Versailles. But this doesn't make DF's sights any less important. Its cathedral is just as impressive as any European one, but it's sinking into the ground. It's actually a bit crooked (Mexico City used to be a lake, after all). Its National Anthropology Museum has amazing archaeological artifacts, dramatically displayed. But you can't look at these Aztec runes without thinking balefully about how Cortés came in and basically wiped this amazing civilization off the map of living cultures, denying its achievements and trying to replace it with one that was far inferior. These layers of presentation were spell-binding for me.

It was just too much. I came to the conclusion that I just needed to go home. I had travelled long enough. I'll come back to DF when I'm a little less worn-down, because it needs my undivided attention.