The dirt about Paris Hilton

The woman in this pictureis not a gypsy fortune teller from a Fellini movie. Her name is Annie Lask and she is a stylist for fashion and celebrity shoots for various Mexico City magazines, such as Caras, Eres and the local edition of Cosmopolitan. A couple of years ago, when Paris Hilton descended upon Mexico City to shill a perfume with her name on it, it was Annie’s job to style her for cover photos.

“If I’m a monster, Paris Hilton is 100 times worse,” she claims. “She showed up two hours late for our first session because she was asleep. She threw a hissy fit because there was no music, and held up the production for two more hours until someone found a radio. Then she didn’t like the music. She only likes Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Madonna and hip-hop. They had to get her iPod from her room.”

The story gets better, or worse, depending on your point of view. “She complained that the cosmetics that the makeup woman brought weren’t new. She complained about her contact lenses – she got something in her eye and held us up while they looked for drops. She has extensions and she doesn’t like anyone to touch her hair. I’ve never seen anyone so insecure – she needed a mirror to check out each of her movements. She has green eyes but she puts on blue contact lenses. She has no glamour, no style. She’s like a sheep.”

Despite this litany, Annie claims that she grew to like the celebrity. She has some reflections about the world’s fascination with the heiress. “Don’t you understand? Everyone wants to be Paris Hilton. She’s a girl who has everything and doesn’t give a shit. Everyone wants to have millions, and be supposedly really beautiful and do whatever the hell she wants. That’s Paris.”

Hello Dolly

Guía del Centro Histórico

Fanny has long, chestnut-colored pig tails and a sad face.She’s yours for 89 pesos. Magy, with round cheeks and short curly hair, only costs 42 pesos. The German has blue eyes as shiny as the Caribbean on a sunny day, and Caro’s open mouth is scandalously suggestive. Either of them costs 95 pesos. They’re not B-girls or table dancers or prostitutes. They’re dolls, or rather, doll’s heads, with arms and legs alongside but not attached. In the store Muñecas Mary-Pily on Calle Jesús María, 87, it is possible, theoretically, to buy an entire doll, but its clientele tends to buy parts and a mold and put them together at home. “It’s cheaper that way,” says María de los Angeles Olivares, the manager. Confronting all the loose parts – heads, shoes, eyes of all colors – can be a disturbing experience. But don’t worry. Each Monday you can take a class on how to put them together.

Mexico City soul food, part one

If there is such thing as a Mexico City municipal dish, it would have to be tacos al pastor. A variation on Middle Eastern shawarma, it is made from pork (don’t tell Allah), marinated with various spices, including a heavy dose of annato, which gives it a shrill orange color. The slices of pork are mounted atop each other to form a huge orb, and impaled on a metal stick, which revolves around a vertical charcoal grill. The fire from the grill is turned up as orders are placed, and the taquero slices from the most fully cooked part to fashion the taco, which is adorned with cilantro, onion and a slice of pineapple.

Although this version of events is not universally accepted, supposedly the taco al pastor is the invention of a woman named Concepción Cervantes, who discovered shawarma on a trip to Lebanon, and debuted her version at a taco stand called El Tizoncito in 1966. That taco stand – now a well-appointed little restaurant – is still on the same street corner of Tamaulpas and Campeche in the fashionable Condesa neighborhood. (There are twenty franchises of El Tizoncito in Mexico City and around the country.)

My favorite tacos al pastor are located not at El Tizoncito but at Tacos Álvaro O., on calle Álvaro Obregón, nearly at the corner of Tonalá, in the Colonia Roma. The ones pictured are at Tacos Frontera, further down Calle Álvaro Obregón.

A night with a bang

The Hysteria discotheque, near Mexico City’s airport, is a monument to local sexual fluidity. A round, two-story cavern, on a recent night in its passageways I saw a man in his thirties dressed in the plaid skirt, white shirt and sweater that makes up a girl’s high-school uniform, while another man wore the short tight tube skirt, the slinky tube top and high heels of a $10 hooker from the Merced Market. Another man wore the outfit of a Playboy bunny. A woman walked by, with her beautiful breasts exposed to the four winds. But were they real? And was she really a woman? That was the $64,000 question regarding the various beauties who circulated in the atmosphere.

There were less spectacular specimens of both genders, too, including bureaucrats in beige suits, boys dressed like members of the Mara Salvatrucha, and a guy in his sixties with a Seventies suit like Travolta’s in Saturday Night Fever. Around one in the morning, the transvestite show began, but suddenly, while an enormous fat man was lip-synching one of Shakira’s biggest hits, gunshots were heard and the majority of the clientele ran for the door.

I stayed put, reasoning that it was better to wait out destiny with a drink in hand than to get stomped by a multitude. Indeed, within minutes everything was back to normal. I left an hour or so later and saw that the entrance had been cordoned off and 12 bullet shells were on the ground. A cop from patrol car S00933, in a bored tone of voice, said, “Absolutely nothing happened. Just a shooting. No one died.”

Lagunazis

Photo by Ibarí Ortega

Manuel won’t say yes, and he won’t say no. Maybe Hitler killed six million Jews in the Holocaust, as well as six million others. And maybe he didn’t. “It’s very arguable,” he says. “I wasn’t born yet in those days. I’m not the type of person who looks at a photo of an individual that I don’t even know, and says he’s this big criminal. I’m not the kind of person who lets others manipulate him. I’m nobody’s sheep.”

After I identify myself as a Jew, who had grandparents, uncles and various relatives who died in the gas chambers of concentration camps, Manolo becomes pensative. “Probably it happened, and it’s a tragedy. But you know what? It’s not my problem.” For over ten years he has sold Nazi paraphernalia in La Lagunilla, Mexico City’s most important flea market. Among his problems, Manolo mentions the Jews who occasionally pass by his stand and insult him. Manolo’s only ideology is commerce, and he even sees these people’s ire as a potential business opportunity. “I tell them, if you want to burn that Nazi flag, go ahead. It costs 2000 pesos. Give me the money and you can burn it right here.”

He says a lot of his clients are looking for “spiritual reinforcement,” and some of them find it once they’ve put on a T shirt with a swastika emblem. They are yet another prospect. “They come back and they say, ‘That T shirt has something, I put it on and I want to go to work, to do exercise,’” he says. “And I tell them, ‘Look, I’ve got other models.’” A badge that Manolo says is from the Nazi era costs between 1500 and 2500 pesos and an Iron Cross– the medal won by Nazis wounded in battle – in its original box costs 15,000. Manolo also makes copies, which are cheaper.

Conversation with him is more coherent than that of the five young men who work the stand a few yards away. Under a Nazi flag they sell the most notorious anti-Semitic literature translated in Spanish. The day I arrived they told me they had sold out their copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf, but suggested that if I came early the following week, there would be more. They insist the Holocaust never happened. “It’s a lie, a trick, a fraud,” says one, who appropriately identifies himself as Adolfo.

They believe in their cause so strongly that it doesn’t faze them that the majority of the world thinks that what they have read in Holocaust-denial literature is absurd. They say the diary of Anne Frank is fraudulent because it was written with a kind of pen that didn’t exist until after the war. That Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin were all Jews. That today, Coca-Cola and Pepsi are supporters of Zionism and that the Jews manage international drug traffic from the fourth floor of the New York Stock Exchange. And why doesn’t everyone know all this? Obvious: the Jews control all the media in the universe.

When I mention that nearly all of my mother’s family died in the camps, they look at me like a misinformed unfortunate. Adolfo assures me that some of them may have died fighting against Hitler, while others may still be around in some part of Poland.