Find an absolutely wonderful set of photos of Lima’s surroundings by Carlos Jimenez Cahua over here. (Image courtesy of Jimenez Cahua. Thanks Big Papi G for the heads up!)
Chuyo (?) in Barranco, Lima. (Photo by C-M.)
The Virgin feeds her child as demons watch, at the monastery of Santo Domingo in Lima. (Photo by C-M.)
Indio del Collado, 1939 by Enrique Camino Brent at the Museo Banco Central de la Reserva in Lima. (Photo by C-M.)
Sin TĂtulo (Untitled), 1971 an oil-on-canvas work by the Arequipa-born Bill Caro at the Lima Art Museum (MALI) exhibit at the FundaciĂłn Wiese gallery in downtown Lima. (Photo by C-M.)
***Support Fictional Hardcore Heavy Metal Bands!! Make a donation to my buddy Abe Lincoln Jr.’s latest art prank/project: Fugue State Records.***
- “The cool new brand that enables you to make real contemporary pieces of art from the comfort of your own home.” Sublime. (Rebel:Art.)
- MoMA’s fourth and fifth floors are vagina-deficient. The Saltz-Master is on the case.
- Plus: the Saltz-Master on the Venice Biennale: “Impersonal, administratively adept, highly professionalized, formally generic, mildly gregarious, aesthetically familiar, totally knowing, cookie-cutter.”
- ¡Art Industry Smackdown, Motherfucker Edition! Geoff Dyer versus Peter Schjeldahl over Schjeldahl’s comments about Dyer’s book. I have no way of knowing if that’s really a Schjeldahl comment at the bottom of the post, but who cares. It’s juicy!  (Anaba.)
- Oh, do they want those Elgin Marbles back. Photo Essay: The new Acropolis Museum. More on the museum here. (A.J.)
- Here’s hoping this British TV program arrives Stateside: Today’s Nude.
- Michelangelo’s supposed first painting. So totally demonic.
- In the O.C.: High drama over some plein-air paintings sold all-too-secretly by OCMA.
- The Art Industrial Average is Low: NYC’s art galleries brace for a very quiet summer; Chicago Art Institute lays off 3% of its staff; Gugg lays off 25. Plus: Collectors score deals at Basel. (A.J., A.O., AFC.)
- Geek Out! The St. Louis Art Museum to convert one of its galleries into a public paintings conservation lab. So rad.
- My Papa’s Waltz: In honor of Father’s Day (belatedly), Another Bouncing Ball mashes up a poem by Theodore Roethke with images by Charles LeDray. The result: pure awesomeness.
- Antony Gormley’s terracotta army. Whoa. More here. (A.O.)
- Robert Indiana’s giant EAT sign to be lit up in Maine after 44 year hiatus.
- Michael Kamber on how to be a conflict photographer. An incredible story accompanied by an even more incredible photo essay.
- Oh the possibilities: Tin Eye, a search engine (still in early beta stages) that lets you find images using other images.
- A Daily Dose of Architecture takes a tour of NYC High Line. And took lots of pictures!
- What would Sarah Palin think? A competition for the design of a road connecting Russia to Alaska via the Bering Strait…sponsored by Sun Myung Moon. With relentlessly cheesy propaganda video — touting it as a road to world peace — to boot!
- Wanted: Buyer for leaky fixer-upper. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House is for sale in L.A.
- The New York Times Magazine on building a better prison. (architecture.mnp.)
- Your moment of Louis Vuitton, Mexicali style.
Classic ceviche, made with flounder, red onions and hot peppers and served with sweet potato and Andean corn at El Veredico de Fidel, in La Victoria. (Photos by C-M.)
Now it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty: The food. Lima, hands down, serves up the best food in the Americas. I’m not even gonna debate it. I’ve been to Mexico and eaten the seven moles of Oaxaca and sucked down tacos as if the world were about to end. I’ve worked my way through menus at all kinds of places, both high-falutin’ and not, in spots such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami. But, Peru, at every level — from the corner lunch joint to the A-List world-class eatery — offers such a mind-melting variety of spectacular dishes, that you could literally spend a month in the country and still not begin to cover everything there is to eat. Not convinced? Well, I’ve prepared a little photo essay…
Special thanks to my buddy Howard for flying to Lima to consume many of these dishes with me. And to Arturo Rojas for leading me to some of these spots in the first place. You guys rock. Hard.
Click on images to supersize. C-Monster.net is not responsible for any damages incurred to your keyboard as a result of involuntary drooling. Vegetarians: You might want to stop reading here.
Continue reading ‘Final Peru Dispatch: My Lima food orgy.’
La ciudad y los perros: A mutt snoozes in front of an assault tank guarding the Presidential palace in downtown. (Photos by C-M.)
For most of my life, I’ve been making regular sojourns to Lima to visit my father’s family, a collection of hyper-nostalgic oddballs and eccentrics that have always led me to believe that Gabriel GarcĂa Márquez doesn’t write fiction. But on this occasion, on assignment for a travel guide, I really had an opportunity to explore the city. And explore it, I did — from ceviche dives in La Victoria to the skulls of saints at the Santo Domingo Church in downtown to the high-end lounges of Barranco, where Lima’s beautiful people arrive to sip coca leaf sours and show off their money.Â
Lima is no thing of beauty. It clings precariously to a set of dusty, desert cliffs and is bathed in a perpetual fog six months out of the year. Much of its architecture is unremarkable, an assortment of concrete bunkers that appear to have been imported from 1960s East Germany. It is grimy. It is noisy. It is relentless in its sensory stimulation — from the food, which comes in a rainbow palette of nuclear colors, to the infinite supply of smog-belching buses, each of which is armed with a guy that hangs out the window and hollers the route:Â Arequipa, RepĂşblica, Abancaaaayyy.Â
But peel away the top layers and underneath you will find a city that is a novel waiting to be written. (And it has, by everyone from Sebastián Salazar Bondy to Mario Vargas Llosa to Daniel Alarcón.) It is in Lima that 2,000 year-old adobe pyramids sit silently in residential neighborhoods. It is in Lima that Andean cuy is doused in soy sauce and served Peking-style. And it is in Lima that well-to-do tennis moms and Ayacucho grandmothers in big skirts and braids all come together. It is a city imbued with a legacy of plunder and violence, but which has inherited all the pomp of a former viceregal capital. It is both ridiculous and sublime; one of the most preposterous settlements on earth. So, in homage to Salazar Bondy, C-Mon presents: Lima, the Surreal.
Click on images to supersize. Continue reading ‘Peru Dispatch: Lima the surreal.’
Mirrored windows, neo-classical mini-facade embedded onto larger sort-of neo-classical facade, chopped-up classical columns, Roman-style statues of naked people…and a Peruvian buffet! All for only S/35 (almost US$12). By jove, I think we have narchitecture! (Photo by C-M.)
Boobies!!! A whole wall of them. The piece is titled Muro, 2009 by Raquel Paiewonsky. (Photos by C-M.)
While my mission on this trip to Lima has been to eat and to eat again, I have managed to sneak in a few visits to art galleries between degustaciones. The best show thus far has been an exhibit of contemporary Dominican art that I happened to catch at the Centro Cultural de España on the Plaza Washington, near downtown. The show, Mover la roca (Move the Rock), features new works by the D.R. arts collective Quintapata, whose members are Tony Capellán, Pascal Meccariello, Raquel Paiewonsky, Jorge Pineda and Belkis RamĂrez. Overall, a highly interesting show. And way better than the couch art I’ve been admiring at many of the city’s commercial art galleries.
Click on images to supersize.
Continue reading ‘Photos: Dominican artists Quintapata at the Centro Cultural de España in Lima.’
The Cine Tauro: Musta been something in its day. (Photos by C-M.)
Lima is not kind to its buildings. The city spends half the year moistened by a persistent fog known as garĂşa, under skies that look like styrofoam. There’s dust: a pervasive influx from from the surrounding desert, mixed with the soot produced by an endless parade of smog-belching buses. And there are regular earthquakes, end-of-the-world affairs that regularly clear patches of the grid.
Even so, the city retains some striking Modernist buildings. Even if, sometimes, they are little more than a shell. Above is the Cine Tauro, designed by Walter Weberhofer in 1960, residing on a grimy corner on the west side of downtown. This was where stylish limeños once came to see the latest releases, before heading off to El Chinito for over-stuffed sandwiches. The country’s economic crisis in the 1980s (aided and abetted by the internal conflict) sent the locals running for the suburbs. Now the Cine Tauro is a decaying porn palace, a spot where solo men pop in for a skin flick and a hand job. (Though, two years ago, artist Sandra Nakamura did use a piece of the sign as part of a temporary gallery installation.)
As the city works on restoring its downtown, it’d be nice if they didn’t forget about structures like this. Neo-colonial is nice. And it’s great to see the areas around the main plazas looking spiffy. But how rad would it be to catch a flick in this building? Preferably without getting stuck to the seat.
Click on images to supersize.
Continue reading ‘Lima, Day 19: Crumbling Modernism.’
