Browsing all posts by Joshua Ellison
Picture of the Day: Mexico City
by Joshua Ellison · 03/16/10
Lucha Libre is Mexico’s beloved version of professional wrestling. Like so many things in folk and pop culture here, it is filled with spectacle, mischief, and a touch of death. The masks are its most potent symbol. To be unmasked is to be humiliated, a superhero stripped of his powers, emasculated.
Leave a Comment Picture of the Day: Mexico City
by Joshua Ellison · 03/15/10
Today’s photo was taken at the Zócalo, the civic heart of the city and the Centro Historico. This is the site of the National Palace and Cathedral. In the late 70s, a key to its pre-Colombian past was unlocked when construction workers discovered the first remnants of the Templo Major, the ancient ceremonial city of the Mexica.
Back in Mexico City
by Joshua Ellison · 03/14/10
I’m excited to be back in Mexico City, making progress on the next issue of Habitus. Over the next week, I will post more photos and share some of my discoveries and conversations. Keep checking back.
This photo was taken in Chapultepec Park, one of the most beautiful urban green spaces I’ve ever visited. I like this frame because it has a certain tough teenage swagger but is actually kind of sweet. Look at the photos behind him: this is mainly a booth for face painting kids.
Maternal Capital
by Joshua Ellison · 01/21/10
In February, the city is filthy with almost-black snow. It drifts from the streets and overwhelms the sidewalks. Drainpipes pour water on the pavement that instantly turns to ice. No one lays down salt. In a few days, a half-dozen guys with shovels will show up, scraping away for hours without making any real progress. The passersby each have to find their own elusive footing; they try to keep themselves upright without making direct contact with the concrete. From the flat roofs, other men with shovels send the excess snow and ice hurtling downward without warning. The traffic moves incautiously through the intersections, spinning off more filth. Cars race forward, just to idle again in mid-block traffic.
But then, a black—always black—sedan or jeep will ride through, gleaming. There isn’t a speck of dirt or soot; even the tires are clean. This seems impossible when you look at the sputtering, gray Russian cars, or even the plentiful German and Japanese imports, none of which could make it a few feet without succumbing to grime. Somehow, though, these cars manage to stay pristine, unspoiled, unimpeded. They travel along their own privileged plane: above the pollution, the crowds, even the weather. Moscow is a place that won’t surrender or accommodate easily to fate, history, or nature. With a little luck and the right connections, anything can be made or unmade.
Moscow release party with Ljova & the Kontraband – Brooklyn, NY – 11/21/09
by Joshua Ellison · 11/21/09
Through the Water
by Joshua Ellison · 11/16/09
New Orleans is a floating city. There isn’t much earth beneath the street before you reach water. Suspended in its basin, between the crooked embrace of the river and Lake Pontchartrain, leading out to the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans is always moving and adjusting, sinking and shifting. The sidewalks and streets have been stretched mercilessly; they tilt and crack and bulge from all the changes underneath.
So many different people have laid hands on this place—empires, immigrants, slaves, and their descendants. Their imprints are still everywhere, on an unforgiving terrain that pushes back against human intervention. It’s impossible to even know what direction the city is moving in, when you try to account for all the complicated equations of past and future, culture and environment.
When Umberto Eco visited New Orleans, he saw “one of the few places that American civilization had not remade, flattened, replaced.” Where most cities are functional and orderly, New Orleans is lyrical. Just read the street signs: there’s the counterflow of Piety and Desire, parallel streets in opposite directions. Humanity intersects with both Arts and Music. Race meets Religious not far from the river. It’s a place where the imagination can float, too.
Making sense of New Orleans is a constant negotiation between time and space, expansion and limitation. History moves in its ways, the landscape shifts too, and New Orleans is their fluid sum.
Jonathan Brent on 1989
by Joshua Ellison · 11/15/09
Our Moscow issue will go on sale this week, and it features an excellent conversation with Jonathan Brent, author of Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia
When the Berlin Wall was torn down and a new beginning was about to unfold across Europe, Russia was completely unprepared for the changes that appeared to many in the West to be the natural result of the love of freedom and a widespread desire to throw off the repressive, criminal, monstrous legacy of Soviet communism. The impetus behind the desire to tear down the Soviet system in Russia, however, had many sources. A desire to establish a free market, liberal democracy was only one of them—that is to say, a free market in the context of the legal structures without which liberal democracy is impossible. This stream of Russian/Soviet thinking was best characterized during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin regimes by figures like Alexander N. Yakovlev, Yegor Gaidar, and most recently Grigory Yavlinsky, the founder of the Yabloko Party. But another stream was characterized by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and many other writers and thinkers who viciously attacked the Stalinist system, yet did so from a very conservative position defined by Russian nationalism and Orthodox Christianity. Others more extreme than Solzhenitsyn challenged Soviet rule based on a nationalism considerably more xenophobic and anti-Semitic, and less humane.
Ned Sublette: A Brief History of New Orleans
by Joshua Ellison · 11/15/09
Our friend Ned Sublette, who was interviewed for our New Orleans issue, is one of the great experts on the history of New Orleans and, better yet, is a highly original scholar when it comes to charting the city’s significance and connections around the world. Here’s a little taste of his work:
And in Spanish, too:
Anna Politkovskaya
by Joshua Ellison · 10/08/09
Our Moscow issue is just a couple of weeks away.
In the meanwhile, we’d like to acknowledge the anniversary of the killing of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a fierce and fearsome critic of Vladimir Putin, who was murdered three years ago.
Amnesty International is among the organizations organizing to press for justice in the unsolved case.
Our friend Keith Gessen, a gracious host in Moscow, also wrote an excellent article on the case for The New Yorker.
JTA in Mexico City
by Joshua Ellison · 10/08/09
Ben Harris at the JTA has been spending some time in Mexico. This week, he interviewed our friend Alan Grabinsky, from the Jewish Salons project, about his new venture, a Moishe house in Mexico City:
In the final days of September, Alan Grabinsky and Paul Feldman moved into an apartment on a quiet circle in this city’s Condesa neighborhood, establishing only the second Latin American outpost of the global network of Jewish residences known as Moishe Houses.
