NPR on Monstress by Lysley Tenorio!

click the image below
for the NPR storylink!

Banksy Film! via The Wooster Collective! thanks....

source

Black and Brown: The African-American, "Mexican"/Latina|o Mix

Me and Gustavo Arellano are screening an ambitious schlock Hollywood classic, 100 Rifles, this coming Monday at the Tin Can Alehouse in San Diego--hit the image opposite or this link for the details. 

The film caused scandal when it appeared owing to an erotic scene between Raquel Welch and Jim Brown--no doubt this "scandal" was hyped by the publicity hacks at Marvin Schwarz Productions along with 20th Century Fox, the film's distributor. But the appearance of this scene and the attendant uproar it ostensibly spurred or spermed, pardon the pun, does give us the chance to re-screen the film with a prepared cultural studies lens, to understand the narrative that unfolds in a way that sensitizes us to African American and Latina/o relations. 

 The next time you hear someone rant about tension between ethnic bodies or worry about changing demographics in the Southern California and beyond, remember that the answer to all these problems is a little bit of understanding and whole lotta love. End of sermon.  Here's some shots I have grabbed from across the internets of/from 100 Rifles:

 

Mandingo

If you are going to study the history of race and film in America, you are going to have to get up close and personal with Mandingo--I taught it in a seminar a couple of years ago and will return to it again in Spring 2010. Onion's AV Club riff on the film is worth re-reading.

This particular scene, wherein a plantation wife, Susan George as Blanche Maxwell, metes out punishment to a slave, Ellen (Brenda Sykes) who has consorted with her white husband, Perry King as Hammond Maxwell, is excruciating to watch but essential to ponder!

Chon Noriega on TCM

... great interview with the Chon-man here.

Yet Another Forgotten Chapter in the History of Race Representation in America!

Wow! Blaxploitation meets the Western, and Hollywood history is made; and now, for a "treat," a clip from Boss Nigger, a 1975 cinematic masterpiece written and produced by and starring Fred Williamson:

Michele Serros: Plastic Horse Fetishist and Cinephile!

A quick link to a Media Rights profile of, interview with Michele Serros, the Sarah Silverman of Chicanadom! There's a nice blurb on Serros, opposite Oprah!, here.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers at MCASD, La Jolla, Thursday Nite @ 7pm

As I was tooling around Laredo in the late 1970s, a would-be "Sicilian" lothario in an AMC Pacer (before Wayne's World made the Pacer seem retro-cool), American cinema was playing out our latest national pathology on the big screen: alien invasion. But not just any kind of invasion, this was a nightmare pathology of invasion and infiltration, the supplementation of the body by forces superior to our own--you can see this played out in Alien, (1978, d. Ridley Scott), and in the movie MCASD is screening this Thursday nite at 7pm, lensed by Michael Chapman (Bridge to Terabithia) and directed by Philip Kaufman, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If you are in San Diego, come out and see it on the big screen! Me and MCASD film curator, Neil Kendricks, will be doing the intro, holding a raffle (can you say FREE DVDs?) and, best of all, leading the post-movie Q & A, where you get to make out like you are Siskel and Ebert and join us in a discussion of the movie. Here's a peek at the trailer:



Where Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) was a coded allegory for Cold War fears regarding ideological or political innoculation of the psyche, Chapman's 'Snatchers is more fitting for the pre-HIV, post-Nixon late 70s: here the invasion of the body by aliens from without involves a displacement not only of the psyche but of the body itself, with humans, men and women alike, as proxy wombs for the demon seed* of the other, the alien, the outsider. This reaches its allegorical heights with the infamous alien "birth" scene in Scott's alien, where a man, made "woman" gives "birth" before the horrified eyes of his fellow astronauts. Here's an extended cut of the scene from YouTube:



That what emerges in this instance, is a very phallus-like beastie, is one for the Lacanians and Freudians to mud-wrestle about. More important here, especially for films like Alien, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and, even, Demon Seed is this spectacle of self-penetration, this destruction of the psyche and body from without, that pulses through the fabric of the U.S. collective psyche in years more remembered for serial killer Ted Bundy (LA's the Hillside Strangler and kid-killer clown John Wayne Gacy, were also out and about), anti-British IRA attacks, and the Jim Jones, People's Temple mass suicide.

There's a great, short piece on 'Snatcher's by Wiley Wiggins here.

*Demon Seed (d. Donald Cammell), from 1977, positing the rape and insemination of a woman, Julie Christie, by a supercomputer, was another big screen narrative surfing this zeitgeist.

Naked Mirrors, Fractured Souls

I have not been adding to my online curiosity shoppe otherwise known as the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog much of late as I have been readying my Fall 2008 Literature and Film Seminar at San Diego State University--the title of this semester's showcase of talent (more on that below) is Naked Mirrors, Fractured Souls: An Introduction to Literature [and Film]. The class will fold together some of the ideas I have played with before but with some added twists and surprises. The big difference with this class is the cast of players/artists/fiends/geniuses who will be visiting our beautiful classroom PS 130 @ SDSU--these include Tomas Riley, Marisela Norte, Gustavo Arellano, Oliver Mayer and, maybe! Myriam Gurba and Culture Clash. It promises to be one of the better literary variety shows on the Left Coast! The class social networking site is here! Check it out!

My TA this semester is a rad graduate student in our program, Kevin Gossett. When he's not researching literature, Gossett hangs his hat with the Ex-Friends, an amazing local band--if you see them listed in City Beat or the Reader, go check them out! Their next show is on the 25th of September at the Beauty Bar.

Tomorrow the lid comes off of our semester-long adventure! Wish us luck.

Over and out.....

Touch of Genius: Orson Welles, Proto-Chicano Motion Picture Director?

Originally posted April 9, 2007 | updated


The first main chapter of Tex[t]-Mex concerns itself with Orson Welles's masterpiece, the 1958 production of Touch of Evil. I don't want to give too much away about the chapter but its main claim to fame is the assertion that Welles was a proto-Chicano director--one of the first to parse the verge of the border with semio/cultural sensitivity and cleverness. The chapter, a revision of a piece that first appeared in Chicanos and Film, is entitled "Hallucinations of Miscegenation and Murder: Dancing along the Mestiza/o Borders of Proto-Chicana/o Cinema with Orson Welles's Touch of Evil."

Here, courtesy the ever-present, churning servers at google.com are the coming attractions trailer for this sordid, bordertown potboiler...



...as well as the famed opening few minutes of the film--this second sequence is from the "director's cut" version of the film that unfolds without the opening credits. For Touch of Evil fanatics, here as well appears the orginal 1958 opening scene with the credits--the quality is a little dicey with video remnants/scratches in places:

An Odd Web Sighting...

...but a "good" odd.

What do I mean?

Imagine a blog by a Norwegian, living in Mexico. He's a programmer. No, he's an actor who is crazy about movies.

What do you get? Mexploitation--a curious blog that is totally up the alley for those of us, the semiotiholics, who fetishize the display of all things Mexican.

Check it out!



Even more tawdry mexicanesque eyecandy is here.