New Thoughts on Latina/o Film from SLATE.COM

Technicolor RITA HAYWORTH

source

this is one very cool collector; other source, boingboing.net

some published thoughts on margarita dolores carmen cansino...

For the Love of Pee-Wee! Ricky Ricardo Who?

Photoshop renders a perfect match. Check out the other 14 unlikely pairings from this fun site.

NEW on Daniel Hernandez NEW BOOK: Down and Delirious in Mexico City

Get the book via amazon here: Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century

WEDNESDAY | 1/26/11 | THE DONKEY SHOW Fiesta! At the Santa Monica Museum of Art! Featuring Josh Kun, Jim Heimann, and Yours Truly...

If you click the images and links below you will see that I am presenting a lecture tonight, Wednesday, January 26, 2011 @ 7pm, along with Josh Kun, USC, and Jim Heimann, author/editor, Taschen Books, at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.  It is the inaugural party for The Donkey Show, a new exhibition curated by Kun & Heimann for SMMOA.  I am excited to be asked to be part of the fiesta!  Imagine that the shade of Jean Baudrillard, cross-dressed as a "Mexican" encounters the ghosts of Remedios Varo, Rosario Castellanos, Frida Kahlo, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin (in Andy Warhol's boudoir)--that's the frisson in the air one gets from this striking new curatorial intervention.  

The simulation par excellence for "Mexico" in the California imagination is the infamous Donkey Show. There are, of course, two of them, both apocryphal, both, also, oddly real: the Donkey Show is the infamous sex show, the staple of the beastial Mexican bordertown underbelly, the Donkey Show is where one goes when one inhabits the border (really, this is no surprise as the instersticial is at once the world of the exotic, the world of the "strange").  It is a magic dark space where the spectacle of taboo, denied sexual magic between human and animal is a real possibility.  Both real and imagined, legendary and banal, the Donkey Show in Tijuana lore embodies a magic world much like that of Alice in Wonderland--only here the Cheshire cat is more like John Holmes, Alice more like Stoya..... a traditional magiclandia of the frontier where witness and agent are one.

The other Donkey show is equally beastial, equally Baudrillardian--or Borgesian, or Sarduyan, for the Latin Americanists who want to kick the Frenchies to one side.  This is the painted burro, the striped donkey or zonkey, that tourists ride for the pleasure of the camera. This cannot be forgotten! The zonkey and the tourist only exist in connubial harmony for the hungry maw of the camera--the tourist shot that becomes a mantle-piece curiosity for visitors from Madison, Boise, Seattle, Pittsburgh, New Rochelle and beyond.

Both Donkey shows, the sexually overdetermined mythical/real beastiality spectacle and the tourist trap sidestreet staple are products of monstrous spectacular scenes--interludes for the eye or the camera that mark the psyche and mark "Mexico" indelibly in the mind's eye, in the eye's mind--in the I's memory and nostalgia.

See you there!

Click the graphic more more info or go here:

http://www.planetillogica.com/thedonkeyshow

Also, this just in! One of my amazing former

students and cool amigo zaps this picture in

in honor of the show! Que Viva Zonkeys!

Chuy Dominguez tattoo by Kiki Platas done in Tijuana at Tinta Distinta!


Even more info here:

The Donkey Show @ SMMOA | This Week!

Hit the ZONKEY for more info...

RSVP for the DONKEY SHOW! This coming WEDNESDAY Nite! in Santa Monica!

Hit the image for the skinny...

From the New York Daily News: Hollywood's Thirst for Latina and Latino Stereotypes

Yet Another Classic American Comics Introduction to the History of Racialized Representation in America or Golden Age Anthropology 101

I love classic comics. I loathe what comics did to my mind.

There's my problem--the technicolor paper fantasy worlds of comics provided and provide a world of escape and entertainment; but this entertainment trains the mind to move/think/react/judge/hate/love/lust in specific ways that are inescapable (Warner Brother's cartoons, documented in the Speedy Gonzales chapter of Tex[t]-Mex, work in a similar fashion--I love them, too.).

In any event, blogger at Golden Age Comic Book Stories does a madly talented job curating provocative representations of covers (and sometimes stories) from the comic book golden age...  Here are some, just posted in three categories that I have devised: World Cultures; Knowing the Enemy; and, because you've asked for it, another installment of Bizarre Caucasians in Print.

 Knowing the Enemy

Bizarre Caucasians in Print