The Next Latina Bombshell

another shot from the Friday the 13th premiere:


Cinematic trends come and go, but I have a sneaking suspicion the trope of the Latina bombshell will be alive and well at the start of the 22nd century.

Xicanosmosis Mexicana: Julieta Venegas Rocks LA with Josh Kun chez USC

Here's Julieta Venegas in a recent music video:

Eyegiene, Draft New Logo Banner, and Camera Portrait

This post is just a mini-warehouse of semiotic bonbons.

The first, a high resolution scan of the original poster for Joseph Green's and Rex Carlton's The Brain That Wouldn't Die--I write about Frida Kahlo, Gilbert Hernandez, and Green/Carlton's schlocky opus in Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America, a revision and expansion of the Frida piece I published in Latino/a Popular Culture with NYU Press.


Next up, a gorgeous shot of cameras (cue irony) that I want to use in my Eyegiene collection for UT Press.



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... a vanity press mashup of a recent picture of mine I have "re-purposed" for general distribution.

...and, last but not least, a gift from my designer pal Michael B, genius of design, that I intend to weave into Eyegiene.

Next Generation [Gay] Latino Stereotypes

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Taco Bell en "M/Otherlandia"

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Mark Dery on JG Ballard!

cool link!

A Brilliant Meditation on the Border: Adam Simpson

My first publication was on Autobiography at la frontera, the border, and I am presently editing a book to be entitled Bordered Sexualities: Bodies on the Verge of a Nation, way overdue--my apologies to the contributors--and so you might guess I am a sucker for, and totally obsessed by, anything that deals with frontiers, borders, etc. You might say I am always already on the verge of falling for or through the verge--forgive the Derridean syntax. In any event, I stumbled across the work of Adam Simpson and his Boundaries project. Go here and here for details. The "play" of his figures across and thru boundaries is mesmerizing.

A Tip of the Sombrero to Izel Vargas

Uncanny, gifted painter, Izel Vargas (of Pocholandia infamy) takes our eyes to this recent dispatch:

"Bill... I thought i'd share this with you. A great friend at UNC, Charlotte, José L.S. Gámez (a fellow Tejano) wrote a piece about the Taco Truck Wars going on in the east-- in this case Charlotte."

This video glosses the incongruities at work as "Mexicans" and other immigrants change the face of the South.

More Lila Downs

Magic stuff for the ears and eyes!

Salma Hayek

Only the Brit tabloids could take a selfless act and spin it as scandalous!

Luchador Fun Via MIT's Image Trough!

Liquifying Mexican Stereotypes

I have written long and hard on the birth and death of stereotypes--"death" here is a dream as the metamorphosis of stereotypes, of narrative in general, is as guaranteed as taxes. In my class on Sex in Literature and Film I chanced to lecture the other day on the dynamics of sadism and masochism. The words are key here today in my archiving of the story of Mexico's pozolero, Santiago Meza López, as they both describe pathological diagnoses of extreme (and common) human behavioral practices that are named after real people: the Marquis de Sade and Sacher von Masoch.

When stories like the one below break, the mind is indelibly fixed with the horror of liquefying human corpses--throw in the lingering hangover of the trope of the Mexican bandit, updated with a post-Tony Montana narco metaphorics and the in-our-lifetime disintegration of the cultural life of the American/Mexican frontera and its hard not to image the next-generation figuration of "Mexicans" including some facet of this horrific, better-than-Poe, tale.

Zócalo Alert

Faithful reader/artist Anabel Weekly, writes in and tips our eyes to a cool clearing house for film, lit, politics etc... Hit the image to be transported!