Kerouac and Kahlo
the line is tenuous, pull two books from the shelf and look at them side by side. Frida Kahlo died in 1954 in the Coyoacan neighborhood of Mexico, the same year that, 6 miles away, Jack Kerouac began writing the choruses of Mexico City Blues. They used the same drug.
the internet makes it so easy in away. I want to know where Jack Kerouac lived when he wrote Mexico City Blues, I search Mexico City Blues, on the wiki page it says he wrote it living in an apartment with Bill Garver, but it does not say where. Each piece has a hole in it that is filled in with another piece that exhibits new holes. There will always be holes.
I search Jack Kerouac and Bill Garver apartment in Mexico City and read in the first article, Searching for Neal Cassady in San Miguel de Allende that the apartment was in Orizaba, which is a city in the state of Veracruz, a three and a half drive according to maps today. This takes the work away from the place I was using as a container.
back to the initial search page to the third option, The Allen Ginsberg Project, in a piece called Mexico City Blues 7 Ginsbergs is quoted, it was is an apartment at 220 Oruzaba Street, an old junkie retired from New York, who had a legal (prescription) for morphine in Mexico, and who had retired to live out his days there. Kerouac was living upstairs and would go down and visit Garver who was shooting-up, or just talking, or…. the work back into Mexico City, into the Roma neighborhood, about a 18 minute drive to where Frida Kahlo died. was it a misspelling, error, or someone else’s history.
I often feel I need to prove the connection to others. Or it is a reflex that before talking to others about others work I need to be arranged in them somewhat. This information grounds me. Allows me to imagine that these two artists, very different, in all regards, existed within 6 miles of each other.
This quote of Ginsbergs also brings in drugs, which with Kerouac’s work is always soon to arrive. It is interesting that In 1946, following her unsuccessful spinal fusion in New York City, she relied more and more on morphine (Oxford). So two artists, Kerouac and Kahlo. Kerouac widely celebrated while Kahlo was relegated often to being the wife of Diego and only after that an artist in her own right. They both used the same drug. Kahlo by necessity, experiencing major physical trauma in her life, when she was 16 a tram hit her fracturing her spine, an injury she never recovered from. And Kerouac in a hipster daze using morphine and hash to zone out, to write, to dig in.
there is more similar in their style. They both shape out of fragments, use secrets symbols to hold a loose narrative in the background.
Then I always manage to get / my weekly check on Monday. / Pay my rent, get my laundry / out, always have enough / Junk to last a couple days (59th Chorus)
Been easy to find Kerouac’s words. The white man speaks and others listen, record, document, archive.
There is a disputed recording of Kahlo’s voice. Some call it the only recording, other’s dispute its even her.
In Frida Kahlo: The Last Interview and other Conversations there are scant moments of Kahlo speaking for herself. The same quotes are shifted around, molded to different contexts with the same general need, to show they know Kahlo is great but not allow her to leave Rivera’s shadow. A marriage that Kahlo’s mom called the marriage of an elephant and a dove.
Typed into the search bar, Frida Kahlo interview then the same adding the word transcript. I found an AI generated interview, an artist supposedly embodying Kahlo and interviewing herself, one article about the collection, the last interview, and many articles written on the life and work of her written by people far removed.
I am disintegration…
And I’m here looking at her paintings making what since of it that I can of being a reality but still looking for her words that made it through the past. Where is the diary the autobiographers speak of instead of quotes from it that end with…
They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.
Andre Breton, in 1938 wrote Kahlo’s art [is] a ribbon around a bomb.
they say that Kahlo’s last words in her diary are, I hope the exit is joyful—and I hope never to come back…
