memoria / montage / mexico
a cultural history of repeated intimacy. text and images by a. r. havel
the meaning of once again / otra vez
I. ¿Cómo estás? Estoy visitando
January of 2017: 50 times a day, staring into a screen wrapped in protective plastic, streaks of trapped rain between like a bulbous Lisa Frank keychain; whether on an elliptical, swinging to the bass of a Róisín Murphy song, or more despondently laying on a dirty comforter, I ask every torso, ass, and twink: ¿Cómo estás? And, like most questions on the app, it’s an ambiguous one. Hay muchos tipos de respuestas:
Bien, gracias, y tú? / Muy Caliente / Me estoy despertando / Q buscas? Quiero culito / Trabajando
I’m laying on the wood floor of a private room in Hostel Isabel. Centro, only four blocks from the gay bars on Calle de República de Cuba. But, I can’t pull myself up to walk towards the blaring disco just to be rejected in person. With frenzy, I swipe between the digital hook up spaces and my translation app:
Hola, cómo estás? / Estoy visitando / Que rico, quiero el vergón / No, no tengo lugar
Sending a thousand hellos into the void isn’t so hopeless: it’s how I met my previous two partners—never mind that both were borderline psychotics with substance abuse issues—that’s just my type: a project. And I’ve got time to lay here and save some lives with a simple “Hola.” My friend told me that hook up and dating apps work with the logic of slot-machines: everybody knows that you cannot strike big with every play, but every once and a while you hit a jackpot so explosive, so intoxicatingly rewarding, that it redeems the whole desperate procedure, lulling that little voice inside that says it’s all worthless. So, you pull the lever once again. And again.
II: I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show ‘dem.
In Atom Egoyan’s 1993 film Calendar, the protagonist (played by the director himself) is sent to Armenia to produce a photographic calendar of old stone temples surrounded by exquisitely untouched countryside. The film is anchored by a series of repeating static shots: first, there are the luminously day-lit angles of churches throughout old Armenia. In these shots, we are looking through the lens of the large-format camera Egoyan has placed on a tripod; and as he waits for the sun to hit the landscape just right, he watches hopelessly as his wife communicates with their tour guide. She is fluent in Armenian; and even though he is of Armenian descent, he doesn’t understand a word, and he cannot intervene the romance blooming between the two. But it’s more than romance he feels estranged from: it’s a kind of cultural fluidity he’s unable to access from his rigid Western context. He cannot enjoy the libations or songs the guide shares with them; he becomes more and more preoccupied with the static frame.
When he returns home, presumably to Toronto, he initiates a new repetition of hiring escorts from a call service. The terms are agreed upon before each woman’s arrival: when he pours the last bits of red wine into their glass, she will ask to use the phone; she will make a call to someone and enter into an romantic reverie, speaking in a language—any language, Serbo-Croatian, Hindi, Israeli, Macedonian—unintelligible to him. As each woman twirls the phone’s cord and gazes out, they speak in a jumble of subjects, verbs, and predicates: an international glossolalia that amount to no meaning. They have called no one; they are not communicating anything. While eavesdropping, the protagonist is able to write letters to his estranged wife; he is able to enter into a psycho-sexual space of poignant longing and abandonment, while also eroticizing his own unknowing. This is a cuckolding not based in fucking, but a much deeper addiction to cultural alienation.
March of 2018: Emilio is just one among thousands of profiles. In every photo, his face expresses nothing—no smile, no grimace, just a blank staring into a mirror where the phone was held from a side. I will learn later this is not some digital playing-it-cool persona; Emilio really carries numbness with quiet grace. Strangers still, I feel no hesitation in admitting my fantasy of hiring one of the many rent boys nearby, either on the app, or walking the dimly lit paths of Alameda or Balderas. “At these prices, how could you not,” he replies, poking fun of my perceived American wealth and bargain hunting.
On his red clay rooftop, I ask him to sit naked along the laundry room walls. Some lace bras and panties are hanging on a line in the mid-day bright, casting arching shadows around his face; it hasn’t yet been explained to me that I ought not photograph subjects in direct sunlight; but, what else am I supposed to do in Mexico City when my idols are Álvarez Bravo and Graciela Iturbide? Their work is about rough textures and reflections, about crumbling pre-Columbian stone and the fresh streaking glass of Modernism; it’s about the myths of cultural heritage in the face of 20th century industrialization. So, how exactly do I see Emilio, in the shadows of fake-lavender detergent wafting in the breeze, against the ghostly textures of old glass etchings? How does the ‘50s rockabilly pin-up tattoo intervene?
At Italo-disco night in club Patrick Miller, his dancing is mostly a kind of sideways swaying. Though, I cannot blame him for taking up little space as this dance-floor is unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed: a host of seemingly hired or simply too-serious middle aged dancers dominating the space and swatting anyone away who tries to enter the sacred circle of Peter Jacques and Pino D'Angiò. The whole night, Emilio had been fielding angry and desperate messages from another boy he met on grindr, now living in his twin bed and convinced the two are soulmates. I had met Brandon the same night as Emilio, in a small florescent kitchen in Colonia Tabacalera, sharing a whole bottle of tequila and (passive) aggressive threats that I shouldn’t steal his boyfriend. But now, in this tacky club, ignoring Brandon’s suicidal messages, drinking mezcal, I feel how natural it is to sway with Emilio, to move in a space of comfortable confusion — I sense that this isn’t just some vacation fling.
a dance departure: while not as formally ordered as Egoyan, choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch was obsessed with repetition too. And though often just as desperate, her repeatings functioned quite differently: repetitious action is not the space to linger and wallow—it has it’s own agency. It speeds us, slows down, becomes more tender, then more violent. Consider “Barbe Bleue” as exemplary here: the man running to return the vinyl needle back to the beginning of the song, dragging his lover along the leaf-strewn floor, stopping until the song progresses too much, past the point of his ability to retain the feeling. Once again. And again. In contrast to Egoyan, Bausch’s players are not immobilized in psychosis. The repeating is not the endgame, it is the ambiguity of the gesture that allows its transformation; most often, the players simply become exhausted and surrender.
Still, one should resist the temptation to consume Bausch’s tanztheater only as some individual emotional catharsis. In my view, both Wim Wenders and Pedro Almodovar fell into this trap: Wenders’ 2011 film Pina, released shortly after her death, suffered from its memorializing of the choreographer which couldn’t help but anesthetize the profound political and culture meanings in pieces like Kontakthof or Barbe Bleue. And when Almodovar intercut a segment from Bausch’s Café Müller into his film Habla Con Ella, the dancer’s action became a narrative device to introduce protagonist men ruminating on loving women in comas. Bausch was overwhelmingly concerned with the way that social systems force their members to repeat actions as rites of passage, whether consciously consenting or not. Very often, her chorus dancers act as ambivalent individuals consumed by an external force to act upon and egg each other on; in this segment from Kontakthof, the repeated gestures of women presenting themselves like merchandise combined with the pre-war music reverberating in a community recreation center, highlights the ways that these rites of passages not only preface forms of social violence but also create nationalisms. In this way, it’s hard to trust the repetitions that appear innocent in nature, because Bausch has showed us time and time again how the simplest of action can turn tyrannical. Repetitions become nightmares, ghosts from genocidal pasts poised to claim new bodies.
While Bausch was using tanztheater as political theorizing since the 1970s, one of Egoyan’s more comparable contemporaries of the ‘90s was Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, who layered her repeatings in the style of her minimalist composer muse, Steve Reich. I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show ‘dem. Come out to show ‘dem. The repetition of De Keersmaeker is clearly an extension of another choreographer’s process, that of Trisha Brown, though Anne Teresa took that process of accumulation towards a minimalist millennium aesthetic: clean, sterile, steel-like, and less interested in cultural specificity—this was, after all, the dawn of globalization as an art aesthetic. Still, De Keersmaeker was investigating the production of femininity as a repetition of action (just as Judy B. famously would claim about gender around the same time). And, her dancers join into this process with a little more grace and pleasure than Bausch’s. As this segment from Hoopla! demonstrates, the interplay of the sexes is not quite as extreme; girlishness is teased with skirts whirling to reveal clean white panties as different degrees of exposure feature prominently in De Keersmaeker’s costuming. Often, a dancer is caught in a loop of tugging their shoulder sleeve down, and pulling it back up—gestures of composure, falling apart, sexuality, and then socially-demanded innocence.
A controversy brewed when Beyonce “borrowed” many of these movements and motifs verbatim for her “Countdown” video without the choreographer’s consent; De Keersmaeker did not mind much, but this homage to a feminist work is rendered truly bizarre when paired with the song’s chorus: “Ladies, if you love your man show him you the fliest / Grind up on it, girl, show him how you ride it.” The repetition in Beyonce’s video also lacks the accumulative intensity that gives it an anxious meaning in their original works; the movements are cool and apolitical; though, an argument could be made that the body-falls in Rosas’s Achterland were also ripped from black black-dancing, an in this music video format, feature a return to form. Or, that Come Out’s sonic origins, a statement of profound anti-Black police brutality, were entirely whitewashed by the Belgium choreographer. In any case, the example of the music video is telling when considering repetition because it simply isn’t long enough to make a claim about repeated action in time; it is also so often cut up, twisted, sped up and slowed down, that these elements become characteristic of the form, not the content.
III. (Dead Dreams of) Anaïs Mariposa
April of 2022: Manu and I gave all of my cum inside him the same name, as we attempted to conceive our daughters three times a day. Now, we’re waiting in a small clinic on Calle Simon Bolivar because some bacteria was mingling along with the unborn. The doctor is clearly gay too, his beefy arms popping out of white rolled up sleeves, tight black slacks that allow his bulge-enhancing underwear to reveal its magic. He gives us a knowing look: two faggots with gonorrhea, chlamydia, or just a worrying itch. With a side smile, he asks: So, how do you two know each other? If we didn’t actually have the clap, it seemed like we might’ve entered the porn intro of our dreams.
The month before, between some inebriated days of carnival, I was laying in yet another bed—not some one-night stand, just another room on my habit of sublets and house-hopping. This one was on Lapeyrouse Street, Seventh Ward New Orleans. Every midnight, the couple two doors down would launch into a shrieking and punctual screaming match: deep belly “Aw, c’mon woman! Whachyou goin’ on ‘bout!” versus a dry cigarette femme “Go ‘head! Tell me wha’ I did! Tell me wha’ I did!” I pulled out my phone to pass the time I couldn’t sleep, and I cruised Mexico City from 900 miles away. Manu’s profile showcased all his tattoos covering a flaquito frame, a body type I had once described as “mercurial metabolism refusing to keep any lard or labor.” That is to say: claro, eres mi tipo todomente.
But now, another chilly midnight, I’m on another rooftop in Colonia Obrera, inches away from Manu’s cerveza breath and his bit of bleached hair. We’d flipped through a book of Charles Fréger’s photographs of masquerade masks and costumes, telling me which ones reminded him of home, Michoacán. I told him we could make some photos like these together. And then I kiss him, pulling his faux-leather plastic jacket towards me; he is shaking, less from the cold and more from nerves that stuttered his words. Looking at the time, knowing the Mexico City metro closes at midnight, I tell him with a sly grin: “I could get you an uber, or you can come home with me.”
With him, I get into the habit of setting the timed-release on the 35mm. Whether inside the apartment, by the lace curtain window where we share maracuya and avocado toast, or later, in a field of his family’s ranch, I want to document kissing him everywhere and always. Each time, I pause and pose for the shutter; and each time, I have a pronounced sense of loss that I never speak out loud—simultaneously, a deep belief in our love and a teensy ambivalence of its longevity. My baby, I’m often saying to quell his doubts, but repeating too to shore up my own. My sleepy baby.
Manu always falls asleep fast and hard. I joke that it doesn’t matter what film or TV-show we choose to watch, he’ll only be conscious for twenty minutes. After he moves in with me, some two weeks after knowing each other, it’s constant huitlacoche quesadillas and bean and cheese tostadas for desayuno, vegetarian pasta for dinner, mid-day ice cold Coca-Colas and chocolate conchas. And every night, he becomes a baby, gapping mouth with light snores, curled into himself, grasping the pillow or my torso. He musters the strength to pull himself from couch to bed, and I stay slightly nocturnal, my face lit by the blue-glow of my phone screen. Scrolling, scrolling: ¿Cómo estás? Estoy aqui con mi novio. Quieres un trío?
return to celluloid: just like Egoyan’s character is caught in a loop of romantic abandonment, the protagonist in 1981’s Taxi zum Klo (“Taxi to the Toilet”) is addicted to anonymous gay sex in the seedy cruising stalls and parks of Berlin. This character, also played by the director Frank Ripploh, is not actually addicted to the sex he’s having, but to the thrill of the chase towards anonymous dick. He is constantly scanning his environment for a potential encounter, and when one is available, he is completely subjugated by the desire; he can do nothing else. This “problem” is brought to a head when his more monogamous-leaning boyfriend asks for exclusivity; more extreme, the film laments this cycle of horniness by showing Frank grading his elementary students’ homework between dicks—children entering the space of homosexual fucking as it’s often utilized by repressive politics. Frank does not get over his repetitious hunger, the film ends with another chase, without his boyfriend, without his job—repetitious promiscuity is a threat to the social order, and Frank is the most pathetic victim. It’s worth noting that the film was made before the HIV crisis, so this was not a judgement of “unsafe sex” in the age of AIDS, or a thinly veiled metaphor for queer death. It appears to be an assimilationist revision of the difference-politics so satirically presented in Rosa von Praunheim’s 1971 mockumentary It Is Not The Homosexual Who Is Perverse But The Society In Which He Lives.
In DV8’s 1990 dance-film Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, a group of gay men uncomfortably inhabit a derelict bare space, crashing into each other more than they embrace, tripping over one other in their attempts to scale a high partition, an escape from an endless loop of psychosis. While one man offers an admission of desire—“I’d like to spend some time with you, alone”—the recipient convulses, unable to accept being seen and admired by another man, or perhaps unable to weave slow intimacy into the overwhelming frenetic energy of consumption. The partition might ambiguously stands in for overcoming shame, or it might be achieving a great orgasm, or maybe it’s a way to enjoy the encounter in the age of AIDS; it’s some goal the men topple over themselves in their failure to achieve. Although the piece was created in memorial to the victims of serial killer Dennis Nilsen, it is haunted by greater gay politics of the 1980s: namely, the forceful reintroduction of sexual shame with the consequences of HIV. But, even without that historical marker, the danger of men admitting their desire for other men, the extreme repression of this, and the subsequent violence that ensues have been enduring cultural themes, from Andy Milligan’s 1965 haunting bathhouse thriller “Vapors,” to William Friedkin’s “Cruising” (1980).
IV: Ooh fall and free, fall and free / Fall and free, fall and free / Fall and freeeeee
August 2023: I don’t have the energy to clean up this apartment on Calle Regina; I told everyone I would need at least a week of despondency after our terrible art residency in Tlaxcala. This departamento was the only spot listed on craigslist—a give away that it must’ve been posted by some boomer American ex-pat; and, on the glitchy video call, I relate so easily to Linda—amateur oil painter turned long-term barn-renovator in rural New York—that I agree to the sublet site unseen. It’s not overwhelming gross, it’s just crawling with little roaches, littered with plastic bags of rotting food, and old rough bed sheets, inspiring psychosomatic bug-bites. When the flimsy full-length mirror topples onto me, little shards of bad luck scratching my scalp, I begin a relationship with the fractured reflection: watching myself flex five more biceps than before, watching twink after twunk (that’s twink-punk) take me into three mouths at once, watching Mitsu make eye-contact while I’m inside him.
Mitsu looks like a lost member of the Cockettes, inhaling only marijuana; and, he pouts childishly when I force a long English lesson in bed. Cuando era niño…I liffft with my grandmotha. “Spanish flows,” I tell him, inserting my finger slowly and with rhythm. “Pero, Ingles es mas fuerte y corto,” my fingers doing a jabbing motion. “No es liiifffft, es lived!”
Lift! I lift! I lifft with He’s saying the same words over and over and they lose their meaning; they become hollow sounds that have no history, no reason; thrusting also becomes surreal when you become too aware of it. You trail off, losing count of people who’ve torn the hole in this cheap comforter wider; remembering the self-proclaimed “gypsy twink” who lectured me on the values of the USSR and then stole my umbrella, I start to roll my eyes and laugh. Mitsu asks what’s so funny. “You’re just so cute,” I say to his fragmented reflection.
a musical departure: Repetition as psychosis is ambivalently played out within sound: take a piece like Reich’s “Come Out,” which Andy Beta believes has “something psychotic that bubbles up throughout the piece, a brutality and horror in the disaffect of Hamm’s speaking voice.” Saying the same thing over and over, unemotionally, represents a form of insanity; and yet, so does never repeating oneself, refusing to conform to the repetitious rituals of daily life. Schizophrenia manifests as both repetition and in-synchronicity, perhaps epitomized in a studio recording in Diamanda Galás’s “Wild Women with Steak Knives.” Galás was minimally influenced by philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari, who theroized around contemporary capitalism as a “schizoid” crisis, and was more interested in embodying a great cathartic vocalization of guttural rage.
And of course, repetition is not inherently traumatic. There is gratifying pleasure in the simple act of repeating as anyone (everyone) who has ever joined along singing the chorus of a (pop) song can attest to. It’s so evident when one listens to music without a chorus: its lack of a refrain feels like a highly conscious withholding by a musician, no relief or letting go of its palpable intensity. And yet, the opposite is also true: if a song is only repetition, like Ravel’s “Bolero,” or a composition by Steve Reich, it rides waves of intensity until it cannot help but explode with a wild orgiastic crescendo. Neuroscience tells us that this desire for repetition in music is primordial, the brain is always preoccupied with finding pattern even where there may be none; a way of coping with the cacophony of existing. But, when considers that the Western pop-song structure we’re accustomed to (intro-verse-refrain-verse-refrain-outro) cemented with the 1950s record industry, how contemporary is this desire?
Compare the seemingly disparate compositions: Thomas Tallis’s 16th century “Spem In Alium” and Donna Summer’s 1976 disco class “I Feel Love.” Though formed by completely different structures and instrumentation, they both pulse on the trance of repetitions that build towards satisfying climaxes; both invite the listener to surrender to the wonder of a higher power: for Tallis, this being “the one and only God of Israel,” and for Summer, more likely a combination of cocaine, speed, and the sweat of a disco dance floor.
