Chile Journal VIII: Chile Dog

Drawing by Hallie Cohen

Lomo a lo pobre (a slab on meat, on fries, top by bull's eyes), and porotos  granados a vegetarian bean stew can be savored in Bellavista, the Bohemian section of Santiago, at establishments like the venerable Gallindo. If you walk through Bellavista you will come to the funicular which rides to the top of Cerro San Cristobal. The Virgin of Santiago, a white statue at the top, which is visible from most parts of the city, is reminiscent of the flying Christ figure in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, only this one is not an expression of cinematic irony. The summit of the Cerro is a holy site and this virgin commands attention on a truly catholic basis, using the literal meaning of the word. But before you even get to Bellavista, as you cross the polluted waters of the Mapocho River from the Place d’Italia, you will come to a hot dog stand. In Manhattan there have always been thousands of hot dogs stands with umbrellas where you get the choice of mustard or relish and sometimes sauerkraut. Chileans take their hot dogs as seriously as their lomo a lo pobre and in the evening there are lines for this particular stand where a hot dog is served not only with mustard and relish, but avocado, tomatoes and home made mayonnaise. While no sauerkraut is in sight, these hot dogs are nothing to sneer at. They can easily constitute a full meal and the delicious bread on which they are served is the closest Chilians will ever get to the baguette. 

Virginia Woolf: The Flight of Time

Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge is one of the great essays on alcoholism, second only to The Shining. And even if you’re brain is dry, you should run to see the elegant edition of Hardy’s classic on display in Virginia Woolf: The Flight of Time, in its last precious few days at the Carrere Gallery in the Forbes Building on lower Fifth Avenue. Here’s a brief note, exhibited in the show, which V.W. wrote to Hardy’s widow. “I was very much disappointed not to come to your lunch the other day. I had been dining out the night before and fainted owing to the heat. So that it seemed unwise to go out again the next day. Indeed I stayed in bed. But I am quite well again now and hope very much I may see you later.” Contrast this to what V.W. wrote to her sister Vanessa Bell decades later, on 3/28/41, the day she took her life, by walking into the sea. “I feel that I have gone too far to come back again. I am certain now that I am going mad again. It’s just as it was the first time. I am always hearing voices and I know I shan’t get over it now.” And here is what Virginia’s beloved Vita Sackville-West would write in the manuscript of a poem, which appears in the exhibit, “Frugal, austere, fancy, proud/Rich in her contradictions, rich I love/Some say, she lived in an unreal world…she now has gone/Into the prouder world of immortality.” And now back to Hardy’s Mayor who was also riven by creative and self-destructive urges. Along with letters, memorabilia (like Woolf’s 1923 passport) and commentary, this gem of a show, comprised of works collected by William B. Beekman, includes Hogarth Press editions of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, whose extraordinary post-Impressionist covers, show the influence of her lover Roger Fry, who had written extensively on Cezanne and Van Gogh.  Some creative publisher must bring these wonderful non-sequiturs back from the dead.

Chile Journal VII: The Museum of Memory and Human Rights

9/11/73 was the day that military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the first democratically elected Marxist government in the history of South America. Those who believe there are no coincidences might place this in the category of the paranormal, but actually on a bread and butter level it’s not hard to see why the country’s ruling elite supported the reign of terror that followed. Nationalization was anathema to the wealthy while for the United States, which clandestinely supported the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government, Chile was another potential Soviet satellite in the mold of Cuba. The doctrine of spheres of influence trumped any concern for principles, a tip of the hat to realpolitik which had been applied in Viet Nam and elsewhere and whose results were even more impoverished than the rationalizations behind them. When you enter the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (The Museum of Memory and Human Rights), a dramatic green box cantilevered over two huge concrete supports, that’s right across the street from Santiago’s Quinta Normal Park, you have the opportunity to descend into an installation called La Geometria de la Conciencia (The Geometry of Conscience) created by the artist Alfredo Jaar. While the museum itself is a documentation of the horrors of the Pinochet regime (amongst the displays are electric shock devices used in torture together with video testaments from survivors), the installation attempts to create the feeling of confinement and terror that victims faced. You are led into a cement cavern and the lights are turned off. There is a button  which can be pushed to exit, but you don’t want to become an accomplice to your own fear. The lights return to reveal a wall composed of sillouettes of the dead and the living, victims and survivors. Then darkness descends again. In l988 the people of Chile famously voted “El No” to the dictatorship. The country of the Nobel Prize winning poet and statesman Pablo Neruda and of the artist Roberto Matta, both supporters of the Allende’s principles, was free again.

Chile Journal VI: Calle Londres 38

Photograph by Hallie Cohen

Outside the Hotel Plaza San Francisco on Alameda Street also known as O’Higgins, one of the central thoroughfares of Santiago, in the Plaza de la Fray Pedro de Bordeci O.F.M, stands a fountain in back of which is the Iglesia de  San Francisco, one of the oldest churches in Santiago. Its unprepossessing structure hides a grandiloquent inner sanctum which is an oasis of peace in one of the frenetic sections of the Centro. There’s a cobblestoned street called the Calle Londres that begins with a curved structure that’s reminiscent of the Roman architecture of Bath. Calle Londres is one of the most charming in the bustling downtown area. If you continue down the street to Londres 38 you will comes to a rather elegant building where torture took place. A plaque in front reads “centro secrete de detencion tortura desaparcia y ejectuacia 11 de Septembre l973-September l974. " Ninety six persons were tortured by the Pinochet regime in that elegant spot during that one year. In 2005, it was declared a monument. And there are little memorials to the dead, interspersed amidst the cobblestones. Calle Londres is a beautiful street with an ugly past. 

Chile Journal V: La Sebastiana

There are rumors about Valparaiso being a dangerous place where pickpockets will assault the unwary tourist. These fears are vindicated when you walk out of the bus station to a seaside spot reminiscent of the faded splendor of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. The decaying neo-colonial Spanish architecture with its balustrades and ornate friezes on azure, purple and green facades is counterpoised by a generalized squalor, with large amounts of dog droppings (there are even more strays than in Santiago) punctuating a landscape of unswept streets. Ramshackled houses rest precariously on stilts along a mountain side which runs to the sea. All that’s missing to make the picture complete is a criminal character like Greene’s infamous Pinkie. La Sebastiana, the one time home of Pablo Neruda, Chile’s Nobel Prize winning poet, also lies on the mountain and as you make the steep trek up the colorful albeit still filthy steps which lead to the museum built in Neruda's honor, you begin to understand why Valparaiso is also looked at as one of the centers of Chile’s cultural life. Like the city itself Neruda was full of contradictions. He was a Communist who was determinately acquisitive, a collector of beautiful objects. He was the last of a generation of poet statesmen (Malraux was his novelist counterpart in France) who exercised imagination in the social as well as individual spheres. Yet he was also a devoted bon vivant who plainly enjoyed the good life. The Medusa face of Valparaiso is the neighborhood leading down from La Sebastiana, a neo La Boheme filled with galleries and shops and wall covered with Lorca quotations and graffiti murals (Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Wheat Field With Crows were combined in one of these). For those who don’t have the energy to make the climb after eating a meal of Churiana, a heavy dish of scrambled eggs and fried potatoes topped by boiled beef, the city sports antique funiculars and a fleet of aging electric buses with a haunting fifties design .

Chile Journal IV: Valle de la Luna

Watercolor by Hallie Cohen

The Atacama Desert is the driest place on earth. With the exception of an occasional oasis, it’s devoid of any forms of life. You fly into Calama, which houses Chuquicatama, the largest copper mine in the world, and attests to the harsh conditions under which miners still live (the scene of last year’s Chilean mining disaster is not too far away). The desecration of nature is counterbalanced by the urge for preservation epitomized an hour a way in San Pedro de Atacama which is the mecca for those who journey to see the harsh beauty of a landscape forged from the pressure of tectonic plates under the Andes, the Domeyko and the Salt Range Mountains which all encircle this plateau. The Valley of the Moon in San Pedro was created by the water flows which in previous eras washed the salt, lithium and other minerals down from the mountains. At certain points in the day the mountains literally talk as condensation creates ebbs and flows within the age old rocks. It’s a natural wonder that is also reminiscent of the sound emitted by radiators in pre-war Manhattan high rises. The Caves of Salt and Death Valley, a sweeping vista of layered rock are nearby products of the same geologic phenomena.  In the distance, sand boarders can be seen riding snow boards over the huge desert dunes. It’s a mixture of Planet of the Apes (the landscape was also the site used to develop NASA’s Mars probe) and Lawrence of Arabia. For those who look for mystery in the paranormal, the wonders of the Valley of the Moon are proof that there is mystery in knowable things.

Chile Journal III: Matta

The Chilean artist Roberto Matta lived from l911 to 2002. His work is on display at the Museo de Belles Artes in Santiago, a structure whose auspicious entry way with its high glass and steel ceiling recall the Belle Epoque train stations of Europe. Paris was a city where Matta lived intermittently and his midlife paintings like "The Art of Think" (1957) show the influence of Picasso and the cubists, though he was literally painting cubes in this essay on imagination which features abstract geometric elements in a three-dimensional space. Would it be fair to say that Matta’s abstract and surrealist works were the painterly equivalent of the magical realism of Marquez and other Latin American writers? During the period when Allende became the first democratically elected president of Italy, Matta’s work on canvases covered with burlap, cement and even bits of hay took on a far more figurative caste. "El Ojo Del Alma es Una Estrella Rose", the eye of the soul is a red star exhibits an exuberance about human possibility. Like Phillip Guston, Matta started out an abstractionist while moving into a more figurative style that included a distinctly didactic element, resonating his strong opposition to the dehumanizing effects of modernity. His “Ojo con los Desarrolladores,” eye on progress is a futuristic world devoid of men whose providence could easily have been Chaplin’s Modern Times. In one of the panels of a cartoonish work Matta did late in his career Matta writes “cada hombre Lleva en si mismo la revolucion come el Huevo contieva la vida,” everyone carries within him his own revolution as an egg contains life.