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Friday, February 04, 2011
Thursday, February 03, 2011
Narco-Tunes Geeking at Wired Magazine
Today I set my last issue of Wired free from its plastic bag and this article waited between the shiny pages and Helvetica typography. If you go to el wired.com you'll rock through some youtube examples of Narcocorridos (Es mas o menos, como Charro Gangsta Rap).NPR did a story on Narcocorridos back in 09.
That's kind of expected right? It is after all culture (listen to the Weekend Edition segment)
Thing is, when the Geeks get a hold of the Narco culture, a FPS video game is not far behind. All of the characters will be wearing awesome Chuntaritos.
No way you can do a taconazo in those.
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
More Thievin' Mesicans! Graphic Reminders of Popular Culture Visions of the "Mexican" in America
I really enjoy the remarkable archive-work being done over at Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine--bloggers like Pappy are our 21st century librarians, sharing a graphic hoard that reveals a gnarly, complicated past. Pappy's words from the post where I gleaned the comics below are well-chosen and apt: "Some of the artwork is very good, but some is crude, some of the stories even cruder. There are racist depictions of Mexicans and at least one ugly page of caricatured black people. For those I apologize, with the excuse that it was the way things were done in those days, without regard to any offense they might cause." While appreciated, the excuse here is unnecessary--in my view, for what it is worth, it's only by understanding how racist representation infuses popular entertainment that one arrives at a fuller understanding of our nation's legacy and destiny. On with the comics!
Tricky "Mexicans" in "Stolen Gold"
"Mexicans" Enslave Shirtless Caucasians in "Valley of Living Death"
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
Monday, January 31, 2011
Yet Another Entry in the Bizarre Bestiary of Peculiar Caucasian Ersatz Humans...
...my favorite line from Rob Beschizza's pithy posting is his description of Baby Lady Di as an "idealized pedomorphic adult."
Speedy Gonzales Cartoons!
Good news: some Warner Brothers' classics including Speedy Gonzales are up on the net again; here are three that are discussed in Tex[t]-Mex:
Here's Tabasco Road:
and, the infamous, Cannery Woe:
and Here Today, Gone Tamale
and Tortilla Flaps
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Friday, January 28, 2011
Technicolor RITA HAYWORTH
this is one very cool collector; other source, boingboing.net
some published thoughts on margarita dolores carmen cansino...
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
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:
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!
Sunday, January 23, 2011
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