monday (amarga navidad)
Last night I went to see a movie in the Cineteca Nacional, a beautiful cinema a short 25-minute metro ride from my house. A couple of months ago, when I made myself a new schedule to stave off the existential dread I was experiencing on a daily basis, I marked Mondays as days to go to the cinema — Lunes de Twinks has lost its charm — and Thursdays as days to look at art. Today I finally went to the cinema. I went to see the new Almodóvar film, Amarga Navidad, which I think is also the title of a Luisa Almaguer album.
As I was getting out of the train I saw Marian Yunes, a drummer I’ve been playing with a lot lately. She yelled, “Jacob!” and I turned. I told her I was going to see the new Almodóvar movie, being careful to place the accent on the correct syllable. She blinked and said that she saw it with her mom (or aunt?) the day before. “It wasn’t my favorite,” she said. I asked her what her favorite ones. “The early ones, no?”
Imagine my surprise when the film was sort of about losing one’s creative steam with age and trying to recover it by any means possible. I haven’t seen the early Almodóvar films, not really at least, so I could only compare it to other films that I’ve seen of his, of which it seemed like, you know, an Almodóvar film. Intimate, sometimes beautiful, sometimes perplexing, sometimes funny. I cried with the two of the characters as they cried listening to Chavela Vargas’s last recording of “La Llorona,” Vargas shouting through her busted voice, the two women on screen crying, me crying, the man behind me coughing, the woman next to him talking about her day in a high-pitched voice, excessively femme voice.
The Cineteca Nacional looks like a spaceship, like the one from Star Trek Next Generation. I’m not going to look up who the architect is, you can probably find that out on Wikipedia or whatever. Getting into a movie costs $70mxn, about 4USD. The snacks and drinks are varied and normal price. I bought a beer for $64mxn. “Do you want it to go for the movie hall?” I said yes and she poured it into a plastic cup.
I spilled some of my beer on my ticket as I grabbed it out of my pocket. The ticket guy, who was cute, scruffy hair and warm eyes, said: don’t worry about it. I hoped he was flirting with me and went into the cinema, where the movie was about to start. I floated between being completely enthralled with the movie, overwhelmed with disgust at the people behind me, and overwhelmed with disgust at myself for being disgusted at the people behind me. I tried to think of Christian saying, oh they’re having a such a good time, about neighbors partying at 3am on a Tuesday. They’re having a nice time.
For a while in grad school or maybe after I was obsessed with developing a theory of infrastructural aesthetics, like writing about art based on its holding structure rather than its details. There’s a lot of commentary on the white box being white and sterile and in this way subjecting everything in it, regardless of the detail, to an annihilating racist imperialist Eurocentric worldview where aesthetics can only occur in the forced absence of anything other than clean, fit, white bodies. I think this applies to most structures.
On Saturday I went to a show at a punk venue in the city center. The roof was leaking, which made the show more enjoyable. I stood outside in the pouring rain and made a sort of rain roof with a pair of girls who I had never seen before in my life. They held onto my arms, I think they just wanted to touch my biceps — a disappointing experience I’ll warn you — and asked me if I was gay. Actually they pointed out that their umbrella was a rainbow and asked if I identified with that, which was a funny way to ask.
Inside the mezcal was incredibly strong and buckets were set up to catch most of the rainfall. I floated between conversations, quickly becoming extremely drunk. At some point I was standing alone, watching the best noise set I’ve seen in a while by a person called ABIBOSS. None of this would have been enjoyable in a white cube. It needed darkness, damp, people talking, people smoking, and the drip-drop of water leaking through the roof into scattered white buckets. I would go to an art show in a white bucket, for instance.
Anyway what I’m getting at is that the Cineteca produces a kind of familial vibe, I think. A communitarian vibe, maybe, a feeling of, hey this is a nice thing the government does for me. I can go there and spend less on a movie ticket and a beer than I would spend just on the ticket at a commercial theater, watch a movie in a pretty nice hall, and leave. In the hall people might be talking, coughing, sneezing, gossiping, either with the movie or not. There were scenes between the couples when I joined the theater in yelling, ooooooooh. I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t shake the feeling that the people behind me should be quiet. Why should they be quiet? One is not meant to prostrate oneself before art. I don’t give a shit if people talk when I’m playing.
I got on the train in the último vagón, hoping to fall in love. I locked eyes with a curly-haired boy. I was going to give him my number as I got off the train but he looked away. I got home and dreamt that my blinds fell off the windows.