Trainspotting, Mexican Style (2)

Last night Liz and I attended another premiere (oh, the glamour), this time the Mexican version of Trainspotting. I'd caught a rehearsal last month - see post - but they've upscaled from the tiny Bajo Circuito to the much bigger Teatro Hipodromo, an art deco former cinema on the edge of Condesa. It's seen better days but the tattiness lent itself to the play… which was fantastic.  
The story shifts from Edinburgh to Mexico City, but otherwise it's roughly the same raucous tale of heroin-users swearing their way to oblivion. The largely unknown actors were brilliant, sometimes talking directly to the enthusiastic audience. Indeed there was a kind of party atmosphere about the whole thing, with sleazy go-go dancers welcoming people in and pumping techno in the interval, including Underworld of course. Trainspotting wouldn't be the same without Underworld.

Dragsters

It's the National Week of Science & Technology, and there are four massive marquees taking up the role of the Zocalo. The UK is the country of honour so we have a pretty big space in one of them with an exhibition, telescopes and a 28m toy racetrack.

The latter is a test-track for school-designed balsa wood F1 cars powered by tiny CO2 canisters. It has an educational point: to learn about physics, aerodynamic design, manufacture, leadership, teamwork and even sponsorship (they have to raise money themselves). But the best part is testing your reactions and racing them, although it's more like a dragsters than F1. You wait, fidgety finger on a button, for the red lights to turn green and... off they shoot - stopped by nothing more sophisticated than a pillow. Science was never that fun in my day. 

Señor Fawkes

Hot on the heels of Dia de Muertos, we celebrated Guy Fawkes night (if 'celebrated' is quite the word: a terrorist plot followed by torture and hanging) on a football pitch near the girls' school. There was a modest bonfire, some good fireworks, punch, sausages, baked potatoes and beans - all very British, even if most of the crowd were Mexican and had never heard of Señor Fawkes. But they still toasted him (if you'll excuse the pun).

Mexican Shoeshine

Had my first Mexican shoeshine today, possibly my first ever actually. It was extraordinarily thorough. Not just polish but all sorts of liquids, possibly even paint, and lengthy buffering in-between. There's something both regal and disconcerting sitting on what could pass as a throne and having this guy attend to your feet. But the hierarchical stigma has largely disappeared - in Mexico City at least. They are a fixture of street life here, with men, women, even children stopping to give their shoes some love for 20 pesos and banter thrown in for free. Mine shone like never before.

Apparently Malcolm X and James Brown were shoeshiners in their youth.

Ulan Bator's First Vinyl Record Shop

Dund Gol Records

There's always been at least one decent vinyl record shop in each overseas city I've lived in. Tokyo of course was inundated with them, Mexico City has quite a few (see post), and Bangkok and Beijing have about two each. And on my travels it's always a pleasure to stumble upon one. To my eternal regret, I never made it to Ulan Bator. I have seen a couple of 'Mongolian' bands - Huun-Huur-Tu and Hanggai (although neither are actually from Mongolia proper). Anyway... today I stumbled upon, if not a record shop, then a nice story about one.
"Until recently, people in Mongolia had to travel more than 1,000km across the Gobi desert to Beijing to get to their nearest record shop. But this year, a new specialist store opened in the capital, Ulan Bator. Batbold Bavuu began collecting records by accident 10 years ago, rescuing them from rubbish bins at the music college where he was a student and from London where he studied sound engineering. Those discs formed the basis of his collection and the inspiration for his new shop, Dund Gol Records. Now he's put his 3,000 records on sale - an eclectic mix that includes Cuban tracks, Yemeni Jewish music, hip hop, Edith Piaf, pop groups from Belarus and rare state-sponsored Mongolian rock bands. His mission: to make vinyl cool again in Mongolia".
Good luck mate!

(Summarised from these BBC and Uncut magazine articles)

Making a Spectre of Ourselves

Craig's 17th selfie request

I've been to a few film premieres in my life, but nothing could compare with James Bond's Spectre here tonight. It was the Americas premiere and given the city's spectacular role in the opening sequence, no expense was spared: 7,000-seater Auditorio Nacional, massive red carpet, Day-Of-The-Dead dancers and giant skeletal puppets, searchlights, Aston Martins and pretty much the entire cast, plus director Sam Mendes, producers Wilson & Broccoli, even Sam Smith (who'd actually just performed in the same venue a few weeks ago).

A couple of chancers

Liz and I turned up in in Cesar's small Toyota, for some reason ignored by the paparazzi. Nevertheless, for the first and probably last time in our lives, we got to do the red carpet. There were screams as we negotiated the steps trying to look cool, but it was probably for the wardrobe assistant. We then hung around to bathe (at a distance) in the glow of some real stars. Lea Seydoux, Christoph Waltz, Naomi Harris, David Bautista, Monica Bellucci... 
And the film?  The film was OK. I'm a Bond fan so easily pleased. There are some great moments, particularly the Mexico City opening, but some fairly pointless bits too, not least Monica Bellucci's fleeting appearance which just about gave Craig enough time to bed her, but was otherwise negigible (negligeeble?). A waste of talent. Similarly, the first ever Mexican 'Bond girl', Stephanie Sigman, never made it beyond the opening titles. Seydoux was good, Waltz a bit hammy, Fiennes dour and Craig was fine. There were the usual car chases, helicopter acrobatics, explosions, fights on trains, exotic locations (and the usual grey, wet London), droll humour, and even Blofeld's white cat (uncredited). Maybe I was expecting more.
  

Day Of The Dead (1940)

Day Of The Dead festivities are in full flow this weekend, so we wandered the streets of Coyoacan, soaking up the atmosphere. From Xoco Cemetery which was crammed full of families tending to colourful graves and vaults, to the Museum of Popular Culture which was similarly chocabloc of crafts and traditional Day Of The Dead food. Talking of which, we had lunch in a cafe in the Jardin Centenario: enchilladas mostly but preceded by an 'interesting' hors d'oeuvres of tacos, guacamole and fried grasshoppers (see left). They tasted of very little really - just crispy & salty.
Ended up visiting Leon Trotsky's house, now a museum, where he and his wife lived as political refugees from 1939-40 and where he was famously assassinated with an ice-pick. The house has been kept as it was all these past 75 years.
I hadn't know that the muralist David Siqueiros had also attempted to assassinate Trotsky three months earlier by occupying the courtyard and raking the surrounding rooms with machine gun fire and explosives. Amazingly Trotsky survived, but not for long.