John Leonard, RIP

I learned more about writing from this man than just about anyone. RIP

Here is John Leonard on Joan Didion--priceless. Harpers' Magazine's archive is over the top good. A Leonard bestiary!

...and, a cool NPR retrospective.

Chicago Chicano Semiotics

David Rodriguez, Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog reader and South Side Chicago Mexican flaneur, sends in a picture from the Windy City of a window display from one of his fave taquerias! Our friend Speedy Gonzales makes a cameo (shhhhhhh, don't tell Warner Brothers!).

Black is the New President

The Spoor of Limbaugh, Beck, Dobbs, and Coulter or a Brief Tribute to the Memory of Marcelo Lucero

Hate crimes against Latinos/as are on the rise and people stand around wondering "what is wrong with our youth." The cynical but true answer: they are learning their lessons well. More here and here. The Gothamist has a brief piece on it here and a NY Times editorial is here.

Elaine Ayala has a piece on this as well.

Eyegiene Estilo Derrida

In the following passage culled from Hydra, Jacques Derrida mulls the dynamics of religion in the high age of the vidiot--a realm where television fuses its innards with god, God, and gods. Get this, even the Pope has a cameo; in any event, this, then, is just a placeholder for a later discussion of eyegiene, or, for new readers, a chapter to be written in my new book on visual cultures:

There is insufficient space to multiply in this regard the images or the indications, one could say the icons of our time: the organization, conception (generative forces, structures and capital) as well as the audiovisual representation of cultic or socio-religious phenomena. In a digitalized 'cyberspace', prosthesis upon prosthesis, a heavenly glance, monstrous, bestial or divine, something like an eye of CNN watches permanently: over Jerusalem and its three monotheisms, over the multiplicity, the unprecedented speed and scope of the moves of a Pope versed in televisual rhetoric (of which the last encyclical, Evangelium vitae, against abortion and euthanasia, for the sacredness or holiness of a life that is safe and sound - unscathed, heilig, holy - for its reproduction in conjugal love - sole immunity admitted, with priestly celibacy, against the virus of human immuno-deficiency (HIV) -, is immediately transmitted, massively 'marketed' and available on CD-ROM; everything down to the signs of presence in the mystery of the Eucharist is 'cederomised'; over airborn pilgrimages to Mecca; over so many miracles transmitted live (most frequently, healings, which is to say, returns to the unscathed, heilig, holy, indemnifications) followed by commercials, before thousands in an American television studio; over the international and televisual diplomacy of the Dalai Lama, etc. So remarkably adapted to the scale and the evolutions of global demography, so well adjusted to the technoscientific, economic and mediatic powers of our time, the power of all these phenomena to bear witness finds itself formidably intensified, at the same time as it is collected in a digitalized space by supersonic airplanes or by audiovisual antenna. The ether of religion will always have been hospitable to a certain spectral virtuality. Today, like the sublimity of the starry heavens at the bottom of our hearts, the 'cyberspaced' religion also entails the accelerated and hypercapitalized relaunching of founding specters. On CD-ROM, heavenly trajectories of satellites, Jet, TV, Email or Internet networks. Actually or virtually universalizable, ultra-internationalizable, incarnated by new 'corporations' that are increasingly independent of the powers of states (democratic or not, it makes little difference at bottom, all of that has to be reconsidered, like the 'globalatinity' of international law in its current state, which is to say, on the threshold of a process of accelerated and unpredictable transformation).

Jacques Derrida: "Foi et savoir - Les deux sources de la 'religion' aux limites de la simple raison". La religion, sous la direction de J. Derrida et Gianni Vattimo, Paris: Seuil, 1996, p. 35-36

Irony

I don't know for how long it will be the case, but La Migra is buying ad-time on the site that tracks my hits for the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog!



Yikes!

Animation

Neo Retro Blaxploitation Comics

More here. With a complete Jim Rudd tale featuring Richard Nixon (!) here.

Eyegiene: Cool New Way to Search for Images

Eyegiene: the Policing of Pornography

Eduardo Santacruz, ace correspondent, is going link crazy; he sends in this anti-pornography rant as a meditation on eyegiene:



original source:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/lists/five-funny-propaganda-videos-110708

Manuel from Fawlty Towers

In Tex[t]-Mex I argue that many of the stereotypes of Mexicans familiar and cherished in the United States are rehashed and refitted mash-ups of English takes on Spaniards. Eduardo Santacruz passed me this YouTube video of "Manuel" from Fawlty Towers, which is a popular and well-known example of this view:

MLA Bound: Gilbert Hernandez, Birdland, and More!

More soon. Here's a cool interview with Gilbert Hernandez.

Mexican "Bombshell"