Eva Mendes: 21st Century Latina Bombshell

original posting 5/26/2008 | update below: 1/13/2011

Were the shade of our dear departed guru of deconstruction Jacques Derrida be asked to comment on the dynamics of the Latina femme fatale, he might well answer with one of his "always already" lines as in "the liminal space of the Latina feminine is always already a return, a resurrection, a renaissance."

Hitting the image above will take you to Steven Meisel's Italian VOGUE site; hit Archivio and then Maggio 2008 for the Mendes/Meisel collaboration.

This came to mind as I stumbled upon Vogue Italy's recent photoshoot with the Los Angeles-raised, Cuban-American actor Eva Mendes; click either of the two larger images above to be transported to an eyegienically sublime portfolio of Mendes lensed by Steven Meisel. Meisel's work here is striking, Mendes' almost sinematically profound--collaborating, the two have concocted next-gen "motion pictures," black and white and color still photography that pans and darts across your computer screen (the tossed shoe in the initial photograph is worthy of Orson Welles). Think the Ken Burns effect but with Helmut Newton's eye, or Humbert Humbert's or Man Ray's or Diane Arbus'... your call.

Meisel's work is glossed here in the NYTimes and here, another striking shoot, of post-operative models in rehab. Several Meisel collections are archived here at Art and Commerce.

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Update, January 13, 2011

Mendes toys around with her celebrity in an utterly postmodern video from Funny or Die...

postscript.... I just ran across a nice piece from the Nordicom Review that includes lucid insights on elements of Meisel's work.

For Derrida | by J. Hillis Miller

link

Just a quick imagelink to For Derrida on my Amazon wishlist for xmas! hint hint!

Back in the Day; Nostalgia For/With Derrida

Careful readers of this blog may know that I carry a torch for our sadly departed guru of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida--evidence appears throughout Tex[t]-Mex as well as here, here, here, here, here, here, and, last but not least, here, a syllabus for my 1998 seminar on Borges and Derrida. Dr. Michael Mahin, one of the stars of that seminar, and now a lecturer for our department, just passed me a fragment/shard from that class, a collective letter we wrote to Jacques, then at Irvine, to come attend our colloquia.



He didn't show.

But we were not hard on the guy! We toasted him and as well as the shade of Jorge Luis "Georgie" Borges with love and good cheer; it was quite a seminar. It boasted the talents of now Dr. Mahin, Tomás Riley, late of the Taco Shop poets, Vincent Biondo, now a Professor of Philosophy at Fresno State, my old GTA Michael Leamy, Carlos Amador, now finishing his PhD at UT Austin, and a host of others. Gracias to Michael for pushing me into a vat of luxurious deconstructive nostalgia!

As the Imposing Shadow of 2009 Lurks Close...

As the imposing shadow of 2009 lurks close, time, once again, to give credit where credit is due and to tout the inimitable mind of Jacques Derrida, enfant terrible of deconstruction, and one of my most influential teachers--though I only got to work with him for a week. "The power of ghosts and their ability to haunt us" has everything to do with the ubiquity and unfathomable shelf life of stereotypes:

Credit Where Credit is Due

The Debt that Goes Unpaid: Derrida, Mentor and Muse...

Click the image; this won't be a waste of time, either!

Chris Ware, Cameras, and the Psyche

Just a quick link to the Obscene Machine Blog, where Chris Ware shows what happens when cameras start messing with the psyche! The Tex[t]-Mex project is nothing more and nothing less than a sustained (some might say obsessed) interrogation of what happens when words and images are simultaneously deployed in the interest of telling a story--in the case of this book, the "seductive hallucinations" and ethnic mannequins that pass for "Mexicans" in America. What one gets is a semantic, semiotic, ontological ménage-à-trois that tests the wits of all--as if the various and sundry superpowers of a literary critic, art historian, visual theory maven, and existentialist philosopher had to be brought to bear in an instant (someone call a psychoanalyst quick!). Ware's work calls our attention as it is an example of an art that forces our aforementioned mix of simultaneously deployed critical methodologies and it advances said quad-cluster of skills at the same time--imagine a cocktail of Remedios Varos [2] and Jacques Derrida, some odd cloned fusion or Man Ray and Roland Barthes and you begin to, wait for it.... , get the picture. These issues are at the heart of, or, to hone the metaphor, infect the retina of Eyegiene--my follow-up book to Tex[t]-Mex.