Oso versus Pooh! Bear versus Bimbo! @ borderlore

Daniel Hernandez on LA RAZA!!!

XicanOSMOSIS: Teatro Style in the City of Angels!

Hit the image above for more info or read the press release that just hit the net:

From: "CASA 0101"
Subject: Have you gotten your daily dose of...
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 09:01:53 -0700

This August.....

An event TWO YEARS in the making...

The ULTIMATE battle of GOOD vs. EVIL...

Written by
Anthony Aguilar

Directed by
Alejandra Cisneros

Get ready boys and girls for another thrilling episode of El Verde!



Born as an alien from the not so far away world of Mexico and raised in the good old U.S. of A, all Arturo ever wanted was to live an ordinary life. But after a freak elote accident, Arturo became... El Verde!!!

Join us as we bring you the ORIGINS OF EL VERDE! Yes, we're going back, way back, to see how it all began. See an ordinary Arturo become the extraordinary hero he is today. Watch him as he battles the evil La Quinceañera and her ultimate plot to destroy the world.

If you've never been to an El Verde show before,
be sure not to miss this one.

TWO WEEKENDS ONLY!!!

Aug. 1-10, 2008
Fri. + Sat. 8pm
Sundays 7pm
Tickets are only $10


for RESERVATIONS:
mailto:tickets@casa0101.org
http://www.casa0101.org
323 263 7684

reservations STRONGLY RECOMMENDED!!!


? Who will you choose ?
Make your choice and
wear your colors to the show...
VOTE AT: http://www.myspace.com/elverdeshow


Casa 0101
2009 East First Street
L.A. CA 90033
casa 0101 is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization

El Vez Sighting!

Just one of the cool polaroids to be found at the day19 project! Thanks again to the one and only Michael Wyatt "Coke Can" Harper!

More XicanOSMOSIS from the The New York Times

Archive of Visually Provocative Artifacts of Mexico

Click here for more from the servers at the New York Public Library--kudos the M.W. Harper for the link!

Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog and the Obscene Machine Blog Converge...

It had to happen eventually, the fusing of my twin obsessions: ersatz subjectivities and Mexican facsimiles, aka stereotypes. In honor of the impending release of Beverly Hills Chihuahua, a CGI wetdream of a cinematic artifact that promises to re-inculcate cross the Americas EVERY stereotypes of Mexico and Mexicans ever to be uttered, I present to you a modern marvel--a Chihuahua mannequin!



Holy Pinocchio Batsman!

I wanted to put this cartoon on my department's website and thought twice about it....

I wanted to put this cartoon on my department's website and thought twice about it.... here, i don't have to think twice; it's brilliant. Sent in by the one and only Michael Wyatt Harper, aka, "Coke can:



Harper also sends in this link to a new series of ads that "speak" through phenotype-manipulation; here's one:

Speedy Gonzales Cartoons!

update

Some of these Speedy Gonzales classics have stopped working--it seems AOL has messed with their code. I will try to post alternative takes--the original posting was: 4/15/08

update

Good news: Daily Motion is now steaming Warner Brothers' classics including Speedy Gonzales; here are four that are discussed in Tex[t]-Mex:

Here's Tabasco Road:

SPEEDY GONZÁLEZ - TABASCO ROAD
Uploaded by SUMMUMDESIDERATUM

and, the infamous, Cannery Woe:

SPEEDY GONZÁLEZ - CANNERY WOE
Uploaded by SUMMUMDESIDERATUM

and Here Today, Gone Tamale

SPEEDY GONZÁLEZ - HERE TODAY, GONE TAMALE
Uploaded by SUMMUMDESIDERATUM

Lastly, here's GONZALES TAMALES

SPEEDY GONZÁLEZ - GONZÁLES TAMALES
Uploaded by SUMMUMDESIDERATUM

More Xicanosmosis in Tijuana: The Adapta Projects ROOM OF ONE'S OWN

More info here and here.

Xicana Player: Patti Solis Doyle

Far Above Cayuga's Waters: Alma Mater Sends Tex[t]-Mex Some Love!

Just When You Thought You Had Seen it All, the History of Stereotyping Takes a Bold Step Forward!

More on the "monkey" here; click the image for more than you may be ready for.

Thanks to regular Ace Internet detective Michael Wyatt Harper, Vancouver ex-pat, and resident of Thousand Oaks, for the headsup. No, really, thank you...... What a post!

update

Efforts on the part of the medical community ought to chill me out, but they don't!

Chihuahuas, Burros, T-Shirts, and "Mexicans": A Micro-Rant

There is nothing explicitly or implicitly demeaning or debilitating with associating particular animals with particular countries--poodles with France, say, or camels with Saudi Arabia, bulldogs with England, and chihuahuas with Mexico; animals, humans included, have a history, and because of the vagaries of evolution and climate, various preponderances of animals can be found in any number of nations. No big deal.

And it was no big deal years back, at least to this critic, when Taco Bell started its series of yo quiero Taco Bell commercials featuring an infamous and widely debated chihuahuahueño:



If anything, the star of this commercial, "Dinky" or "Gidget," (depending on your take on a controversy) is like the "Mexican," Miguel "Mike" Vargas (Charlton Heston) from Touch of Evil (tirelessly documented in the first chapter* of Tex[t]-Mex); but where Vargas eschews pre-Psycho hot gringa Janet Leigh for the affections of Orson Welles in a fat suit, Gidget/Dinky ignores the allures of amor for food--the culinary wins out over the erotic, as, coincidentally enough, with Welles!

Both "Mike Vargas" and the yo quiero Taco Bell pooch play against 'type, against stereotype, given that the history of "Mexicans" in the cine/cultural space of America was always decidedly sexual--a dastardly sexuality, a swarthy eroticism accelerated to the point where "Mexicans" as synecdoche for sexuality isn't much of a stretch.

But other efforts are less "innocent." So it is that I have taken the time to out the Tex[t]-Mextian "normalcy" of Disney's Beverly Hills Chihuahua coming soon to a theater and blu-ray disk near you. And now I take the time to note the "humor" of "Mexican" T-shirts:




Drunk frat boys do need to wear t-shirts in TJ, I'll grant you that--the spectacle of melanoma soliciting pale skin the last thing one needs to see while cruising the sights and sounds of Avenida Revolución. But this out sized, be-testicled beast, semiotically fused with it's semantic equivalent, "Mexico," cries out for further scrutiny. Already a synecdoche-rich term (testicles or "balls," as shorthand for moxie, chutzpah, fortitude, drive, etc. with virulently masculine overtones), here its symbolic equivalent looming there in green between the silhouetted burro's back legs, screams out with force, --this is the power of images they silently scream, they stealthily infuse the psyche through the eyes with the veritable force of an orchestrated cacophony: balls, testicles [texticles?], huevos, force, strength, machismo. ¡ay caramba!

More on this to follow.


* "Hallucinations of Miscegenation and Murder: Dancing along the Mestiza/o Borders of Proto-Chicana/o Cinema with Orson Welles's Touch of Evil"

I happened across these new BBC ads on adbox...

...one of which focuses on the US/EUM border:


Leave it to the BBC to 'see' something other media engines work to obscure.

On another note, the Che ad here freaks me out!

The OC Weekly on Monica Palacios: She Don't Need No Stinking Wetsuit!

Xicanosmosis, 1992: Oscar de la Hoya at the Olympics

Just a quick clipping from the August 2008 issue of Latina Magazine--proof positive that the cultural dynamics of xicanosmosis--the syncretic melding of Mexican and Unitedstatesian cultural miasmas and elixirs--is always on the march; some key semiotic interactions to note in the unattributed photo: the adidas logo, the "American" flag, the Mexican flag, and the Xicano boxer, who made 20th century boxing history.

ps: Is someone at Latina Magazine reading this blog?

Pixar

Though I have yet to totally forgive John Lasseter and Pixar for the Mexican Sombrero/Cantina scene in A Bug's Life, I am not blind to the magic of he and his wizards animation--here's the new short, "Presto" now playing with Wall-E:

Tex[t]-Mextian Eyegienics

Also, placed here as a research placeholder, a reference for future exploration forwarded here via the magic of the internets by Michael Wyatt Harper--the Ouroboros, click the beast for more info!

Of War and "War": 'Low Rider' and Black/Mexican Tensions

The Memín Pinguin blow-up shows that African American and Latino community tensions are on the rise nationally--all the more reason to remember this Raza anthem and the band, ironically called "War," that made it possible:

Animation: "9" by Shane Acker and An Eye for Annai by Jon Klassen and Dan Rodrigues

9 Nine Shane Acker Short Animation

Literary Debts Paid: A Tale of the Hold Steady and John Berryman

A break from the stereotypes for music, a poet, a rock band, and a high school. I ran across this video of The Hold Steady performing 'Stuck between Stations.'  What's special is that it was their first public performance of the song and it was played live before an audience of high school students in a gymnasium.  The first video here is the school performance--Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn starts his intro about a minute or so into the video.  It's pretty moving and reveals the literary foundation (John Berryman) of this very powerful rock band.

The Hold Steady at Littleton High School


Here's the finished video of the song:

STUCK BETWEEN STATIONS - The Hold Steady

Eyegiene and Synecdoche, New York: The Eyes of Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze

When people ask me "what is eyegiene all about," I seem to always flail about with cinematic/literary/art references: "imagine Borges translated through Buñuel's camera; Pynchon as filmed by the Coen Brothers; Kieslowski painted by Remedios Varo," and so on.

Two artist who get it and live it in their projects are Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze--in films like Being John Malkovich, and soon, Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman and Jonze weave cinematic canvases masked as mirrors; or better, filmed mirrors that double as novels. Here's a taste from the new film--below the snippet is some footage from the film's Cannes debut earlier this year:





For those wrestling with the title of the film, it's named after the rhetorical part of speech, synecdoche (si NECK doe kee) that means "part for whole" as in "all 'hands' on deck" where 'hands' shorthands for sailors' hands or labor in general. It is the coolest of metonymies, even cooler than catachresis and the foundation of all poetry and art. Here's the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary, on "synecdoche."



More on this after the movie opens here stateside. As a quick aside, I love that Kaufman has named his film using a pun, where Synecdoche, NY proxies for the anticipated Schenectady, NY. At Cornell, back in the day, back in the high renaissance of critical theory, I used to make a joke in seminar, a horrible pun, really, where I would say Chaka Khan in lieu of French psychoanalytic hero Jacques Lacan. Kaufman's done me one better!

Chaka Khan fans will dig this flashback to her days with Rufus--1974 at a Bob Hope hosted [!] event, no less!

Fall 2008 Class Now On Tap

I have just updated the website for my fall 2008 class at SDSU. Now that I am the chair of the department, it gets harder and harder for me to make the time to teach my regular classes.

The irony? Now, more than ever, I NEED to be teaching to survive the trials that being a quasi-administrator throws in my lap on a daily basis. The joke about English departments is that organizing Lit professors is like herding cats! My update? It's like juggling cats on fire!

In any event, here's my Fall 2008 class--let me know what you think!

Ask A Mexican Estrella Gustavo Arellano Challenges the Ghost of Cesar Chavez to Lucha Libre!

Click here for the skinny!