High Tech Aztec, er, Rodent or Next-Gen Speedy Gonzaleses

A quick link to a story about genetic engineering with a cameo headline featuring the "fastest mouse in all Mexico." Andale, andale, arriba, arriba!

To your left? Speedy's new nemesis! Sorry Sylvester.

Watching Frida Kahlo Through Nickolas Muray's Camera

A traveling gallery of Nickolas Muray photographs of Frida Kahlo, her posse, and some of her paintings is making the rounds these days. Muray's evocative photos match Gilbert Hernandez's pen and india ink when it comes to revealing the inner life of oil painting's 20th century Mexican diva.

Meanwhile, Kahlo-loving gossip mongers may want to peruse the sassy palabras of Diego Rivera's daughter--the behemoth Lothario's female issue holds no punches.

The fifth chapter of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in America studies the way Kahlo's biography shaped the eccentric eye of Chicano comic book genius Hernandez.

Ask-A-Mexican Agitprop Hijinks!

Just a quick link to my cool, Mexican, cultural studies partner-in-crime, Gustavo Arellano, caught recently, here on the elementary school lecture trails!

Órale!

Arellano visits and reads at SDSU 2pm on Wednesday, November 28, 2007 in the Love Library (LA 2203), or, as I call it, the Library of Love owing to all the voyeurs wankers that used to hang out there. Arellano appears courtesy of the Hugh C. Hyde Living Writers Series and, of course, the mothership, literature.sdsu.edu.

Breaking News!

More on Arellano here--replete with huge, Norma Desmond style close-up picture!

Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino!

While spelunking the internet I stumbled upon this low-resolution print of a period 8 x 10 publicity glossy, post-electrolysis!, of the one and only Rita Hayworth--aka Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino. I ran it through the alchemy of photoshop and was able, via filters and philtres, to render this decent print archived here for research and presentation purposes.

Michelle Serros is Back in the House!

Just a quick nod to Diva escritora Michelle Serros, who is out with a hot new tome! Read it and weep--and laugh and freak out!

Narcissism Rears Its Less-than-pretty Head!

....'tis true! 'tis true! That poor schmuck stuck by the side of the river peering at himself se queda pobre next to the herculean promotion bandwagon that is Tex[t]-Mex.

Still and all, I would be remiss if I did not remind dear readers and innocent internet spelunkers today that the traveling Tex[t]-Mex experience, with its crack team of hangers-ons and posse of Tejano vaqueros, is rolling into the magnificent City of Angels, Los Angeles, with readings tonight in Los Feliz's ultra cool Skylight Books (poster) and tomorrow, Thursday, November 8, 2007 at USC where I will be sure to be sporting my quarterback-Mark-Sanchez-inspired "Mexico" mouthpiece.

Go Trojans!


Órale!

Shilling Grandmothers!!!

I am on tour in San Antonio--only a second to tip you to an AdAge story on abuelitas and advertising. More soon!

Tumescent Dueling Phallic Flags in Laredo, Texas USA and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico

...a quick newsbreak from Laredo, Texas where I am hiding out from my job as Chair of literature.sdsu.edu and touring in support of Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America.

There are Freudian flags dueling here in Laredo--a massive Peter North-esque American flag on the Laredo side; and an even more, um, tumescent John Holmes-esque flag towering over los dos laredos on the Mexican side of the border in Nuevo Laredo. More here as well.

When I get back to San Diego next week I will try to post pictures and a little film of this semiotic, warring crossing of the swords, here deep in the penumbra, or, the pudenda, of South Texas.

Holy nationalist erection, batsman!

"Next Stop Cucamonga": A Texas & California Odyssey!

Every now and then someone slips up and leaves the cell-door open and a professor gets to excape her or his host asylum to hit the road and go "on tour," sort of speak.

Ok, it's not quite the Frampton Comes Alive tour or Cheap Trick, Live at Budakan sans groupies, but it's as close as us mortar-board wearing, would-be / wanna-be, band-on-the-run, robe & hood sporting wonks are gonna get to that legendary life of tour-buses, champagne, and debauchery.

So it is with great pleasure that I let slip to occasional readers and random image-safari visitors that I am visting Austin (The University of Texas at Austin, UT, November 1), San Antonio (The University of Texas at San Antonio, UTSA, November 5), Los Feliz (at Skylight Books, November 7), Los Angeles (The University of Southern California, USC, November 8), and Santa Cruz (at the Felix Kulpa Gallery, The University of California, Santa Cruz, UCSC, December 7) in support of Tex[t]-Mex.

If you are near one of the readings come out and say hola! Mil gracias a La Bloga for the shout-out regarding this tour!

The poster (below) that Michael Buchmiller did for the Texas gigs is nothing short of amazing--gracias to genius Buchmiller for his savvy graphic eye. Guillermo Nericcio García, rogue, semiotic, imagemeister from memogr@phics designcasa, came up with one as well (left) for the USC reading. Each appears here in living color.

Arrivaderci!

The New York Times Weighs in on Tex-Mex...

... cooking! not my book--still waiting on that one!

Eagle-eyed colleague, June Cummins-Lewis, tipped my eyes to this cool piece in Manhattan's finest fish-rap--a veritable paean to Tex-Mex food. Check it out.

First Rita Hayworth and Electrolysis and now Che Guevara's Lock of Hair

The Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog already has enough problems dodging the taunts of "hair fetishist" from unruly readers what with my ongoing archeology of Rita Hayworth's use of electrolysis in her transformation from Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino. Now, Che Guevara's hair enters the picture as the BBC is reporting that a lock of the revolutionary's and Chicana/o poster child's hair is up for auction. Next thing you know Speedy Gonzales will star in a short animated feature with a bikini wax!

The dark side of all this follicular frivolity? Go here.

Trafficking in Relics: The "Bones" of Saint Rita Hayworth, Sor Lupe Vélez et al

The Lupe Vélez chapter of Tex[t]-Mex sets up an argument that I will try to expand in Eyegiene, a follow-up collection of essays on the seductive hallucination of visual culture in America. Building on medievalist Jeffrey Hamburger's work on Saint Veronica, "Veronika," and/or vera icon (icon), I try to map the matrix wherein the ecstatic spirituality and greed (never a mutually exclusive pairing) that drive relic-markets of the medieval period (the fetishistic trafficking in the bones, fingernails, hair, etc of departed saints) evolve. Now, here in the present, centuries later, living in a time wherein the gods and God have been evicted by the findings of Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, and Freud (The Four Horsemen of the tail-end of the 19nth Century), all that spirituality, all that ecstacy, all that lu$t need some outlet, some release, some jouissance damn it to hell, and they loving saints of old find themselves replaced in a constellation/cluster-fuck of loathing and loving by Celebrities, of all people!
In this sordid, eyegienic scenario, Lady Diana of Great Britain cameos for the Virgin Mary; Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan, pudenda akimbo, have bit parts as proxies for Mary Magdalene, someone who really knew her way around the block;

Walker Percy's notion of "certification" gets close to nailing the intricacies of this process. In his under-rated novel The Moviegoer, the main characters, "Binx" Bolling and his cousin/lover Kate, try to find meaning in their lives.

Binx, channeling Percy (to whom we owe mucho thanx for rescuing Confederacy of Dunces from the dust heap of history) tells how newsreels and television can give one that sought for meaning in life by "certifying" your existence. For example, you don't really exist until a pan of the camera on a news story reveals your house to you on the boob tube--in an odd way, the corpses of houses televised today in San Diego are somehow certifying the existence of select, suffering, watching viewers/victims.

The waning mobs on MySpace and waxing hoards on Facebook, are, caught up in this somehow as well. In any event, as you may have noticed, I am as big a sucker for celebrity relics as any other doofus, and I happen to have web sentinels that let me know when a "good buy" hits the market. Like this one, of Rita Hayworth, by George Hurrell, from 1941:



Or this one, of Rita, just after Orson Welles changed her hair for The Lady from Shanghai.

This last one, of Carole Lombard, also by Hurrell's studio, is a mini-allegory/parable on celebrity and the sacred, narcissism and semiotics all by itself:

On a side note, the passion of these warring medievalists for their field is bracing!

And the Shade of Baudrillard Keeps on Laughing, Borges's Too, at Baudrillard for Stealing his Schtick...

When I first moved to San Diego and would go to "Old Town"--a facsimile of old San Diego as imagined by Disney dreaming of Grenada (it has since been ruined by Gringos from Delaware and I actually miss it)--I would joke that I now knew what a real mouse must feel like walking through Disneyland. Something like that, in reverse, is happening now as chains of Taco Bell "restaurants" are poised to enter the Mexican market. AdAge is on the story of simulacras, tortillas, and brown, spicy meat-esque paste.

Mexican Jesus, Depeche Mode, Latino Semioticity, and Lázaro Lima

I just got a cyberpostcard from Lázaro Lima of New York, author of The Latino Body, pointing me to some fine anti-iconoclastic doings down in San Antonio where I am lecturing at UTSA on November 5, 2007. No doubt some church site/sightseeing is in this Mexican's future!

Lima's meditation on "Personal Jesus" as Depeche Mode's "Chicanesca cultural intervention" is a keeper--the video rocks as well! It's funny that I had wiped the memory of Depeche Mode's song from my head when it is so visually in harmony with the whole Tex[t]-Mex project.

Gracias Lázaro!

The Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog Silenced!

update to original 9/21/07 posting!
source


Regular reader and contributor David O. Garcia sends me an email enquring innocently if I am "familiar with the giant Mexican caricature at the North Carolina/South Carolina border? Here is the website."

Sweet Mother of God--I don't know if I should call them to sell my book or book a charter flight over there for a month-long anthropological investigation. Pedroland with its iconic sleeping "Mexican" leaves me speechless! More soon! The Giant Sombrero--egads!


UPDATE

Equally hard to take? Be sure to read the pitch to buy.