My friend Vita brought me here, to the Anahuacalli, to disrupt my sense of time. The Museo Anahuacalli is a strange, mausolean structure that looms above a courtyard, conceived by Diego Rivera as a studio and showcase for his massive collection of pre-Hispanic artifacts. Rivera, the larger-than-life Mexican muralist, did not live to see it finished. Completed by Juan O’Gorman and Ruth Rivera after Rivera’s death in 1957, the main building is a Modernistic, pseudo-Toltec structure, assembled from volcanic rock.
In its cool stone halls, between trapezoidal doorways, beneath mosaics set by Rivera and O’Gorman, figurines and idols are arranged in glass cases set into the walls. The artifacts are arranged by theme and form more than period or region, their provenances and contexts unknown or deliberately withheld. A few signs, added more recently, give generalized explanations. After a while I stop reading them. They interrupt the structure’s underworldly effect. At the end of one hall, stairs descend to a stone altar and a stagnant pool filled with coins. A centipede lying dead amid the pesos. When Vita drops in a coin, the water barely ripples. A chthonic plunk.
At the entrance, we walked past a stone slab etched with Rivera’s words: “Devuelvo al pueblo lo que de la herencia artística de sus ancestros pude rescatar.” I return to the people what I was able to rescue from the artistic heritage of their ancestors. A magnanimous notion, but the building seems less an act of rescue than reinvention, with the distinctive signature of Rivera himself. The point is not for visitors to know precisely when these objects were made, or why, but for them to marvel at their strangeness, to re-imbue them with spiritual potency, and even to inspire a sense, however ahistorical, of national continuity. The Anahuacalli is not just a matter of la herencia but la herencia artística, not just pride in a country but awe at its forms. Something deeper and weirder than patriotism.
As we make our way upward, Vita keeps bringing up this idea of national aesthetics, emphasizing the second word as a way of differentiating the Anahuacalli from anything that might exist in the United States, a country more insecure and vengeful in its banishment of indigeneity and prehistory. She mentions her first visit to the Museum of the American Indian in D.C., which felt “more like a natural history museum.” Different museums in different countries with different mandates, but it’s no accident: American colonists long ago decided that natives were not men like them but part of the wilderness that would burn and recede with their settling.
Take Mount Rushmore, which was completed some fifteen years before the Anahuacalli, those busts of American heroes blasted onto land seized from the Lakota people. Not that a more elegant aesthetic would have atoned for the historical crimes. But the US national aesthetic is one of erasure, with little need for even the pretense of history. Just tall tales and patriarchs, a New World made endlessly new. It is a mountaintop-removal aesthetics, blasting away at the land’s deep history until it tumbles like rubble into the valley fills of time.
Here, on the other hand, one is lowered into an imagined past. Both monuments are ahistorical, but this odd house of myth makes your mind go wild rather than blank. The lost context of these objects yields to their forms, which become both more familiar—here is a skull, a dancer, a snake—and more alien—who on earth could have made this? and why? and what does it mean? and 2,000 years ago? The building itself, a merging of midcentury functionalism and Mayan architecture, only intensifies the feeling.
Up the first flight of stairs, a large, well-lit room displays huge sketches of Rivera’s murals, including drafts of the mural that Nelson Rockefeller famously ordered destroyed (Rivera painted in Lenin and wouldn’t remove him). This room is the most unabashedly grandiose, perhaps excessively so. Rivera’s drafts hang above display cases that house animal-shaped urns and figurines, as if to suggest a kinship, a lineage, between the ancient world and the throngs of Rivera’s famous murals. I suppose one can’t make national myths without placing oneself toward the top.
However dubious Rivera’s motives, however appropriative or anachronistic his project, however much his gift to the people is in fact a monument to himself, it is nonetheless reflective of an attempt to conjure a new national aesthetic out of a region’s entire history. That there are hammers and sickles inlaid in the floor next to Mayan deities reflects an original attempt at syncretism, dissonant or propagandistic though it may seem. Here time expands and contracts. History feels linear and then cyclical and then entirely incoherent. The sacred vertigo of this weird, pyroclastic house.
When we reach the building’s summit, a tilted mirror reflects us, the sky, the view of the smoggy City. Standing atop this building, made of rocks created in the long-ago eruption of the Xitle volcano, Vita explains that some of this smog is actually smoke from Popocatépetl, a still-active volcano south of the City.
I linger a minute longer. As I descend, alone, two old American tourists with backpacks climb the stairs, clutching the railing. “The hard part,” one says, “isn’t going up, it’s coming back down.” It’s true. Coming back down, I feel lightheaded with timelessness. Have I been taught something? Have I been tricked?
When I walk out into the light, a stray cat sits at my feet. “Es Diego,” laughs Vita. We sit at the nearby cafe with our drinks, watching Diego leap onto a stone slab to preen in the sun. Everyone enraptured, taking photos. A little deity, his little altar.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
from the discourse
Zoe Hu on the tradwife and tradlife for Dissent:
Only tradition can salvage love from modern indignities and the early-morning commute. Like a trapdoor, the idea swings open to reveal a baby-pink fantasy too fragile and nostalgic to be taken in the open air. Regular people preoccupied with bills, healthcare premiums, and rising rents will find much of the tradlife lifestyle to be out of reach. That paradox is what makes it such potent social media fare: tradlife is, at bottom, perpetuated by “influencers” who know how to make others feel desirous and frustrated in equal measure. It is a menacing advertisement jingle, for a product people may not want or be certain exists.
Zain Khalid on the decline of Salman Rushdie’s fiction for The Drift:
Rushdie maintains that the fatwa did not change his writing. This is hard to believe. In the immediate aftermath of the fatwa, Amis — by then a friend — wrote, “Rushdie has vanished into the front page,” and it became an even more apt statement in the decades that followed. But taking Rushdie at his word, and casting aside the most forgivable explanation for the rapid decline of his work, we can read the novels that followed his death warrant as waypoints to the terminus of his literary mode, examples of the diminishing return on stylistic investment.
from the future
James Somers on Whisper, a new AI transcription tool, for the New Yorker:
Whisper is basically as proficient as I am at transcription. The program picks up on subtle jargon, handling words whose sounds might easily be confused with other words’; for instance, it correctly hears a mechanical engineer saying, “It’s going to take time to CAD this up,” even capitalizing “CAD”—an acronym for “computer-aided design”—correctly. It figures out how to punctuate a person’s self-interruptions, as in, “We’re almost going to ship. We’re about to—the next one’s going to ship.” It’s free, it runs on my laptop, and it’s conceptually simpler, by a long shot, than anything that came before it.
Max Read looks at CNET’s and BuzzFeed’s, plans to replace writers with AI.
[L]ooking at the actual application of large language models in each case does not make me feel particularly optimistic about the future of AI in media. Our example of AI being used “unethically” is an extremely successful industrial-scale SEO spam business; our example of AI used “ethically” is … expensively computer-generated Mad Libs.
weekly wiki
Read back about another odd museum, a dream of wasps, and American monuments. If you’re enjoying this almanac, subscribe and share it with friends.