In light of the recent tragedy in Pakistan, the NY Post's article provides an alternative take on the assasination. Follow the link to read Ralph Peters' view on the assasination's effects on Pakistan.
Or read the article here:
THE BHUTTO ASSASSINATION: NOT WHAT SHE SEEMED TO BE
By RALPH PETERS
December 28, 2007 -- FOR the next several days, you're going to read and hear a great deal of pious nonsense in the wake of the assassination of Pakistan's former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto.
Her country's better off without her. She may serve Pakistan better after her death than she did in life.
We need have no sympathy with her Islamist assassin and the extremists behind him to recognize that Bhutto was corrupt, divisive, dishonest and utterly devoid of genuine concern for her country.
She was a splendid con, persuading otherwise cynical Western politicians and "hardheaded" journalists that she was not only a brave woman crusading in the Islamic wilderness, but also a thoroughbred democrat.
In fact, Bhutto was a frivolously wealthy feudal landlord amid bleak poverty. The scion of a thieving political dynasty, she was always more concerned with power than with the wellbeing of the average Pakistani. Her program remained one of old-school patronage, not increased productivity or social decency.
Educated in expensive Western schools, she permitted Pakistan's feeble education system to rot - opening the door to Islamists and their religious schools.
During her years as prime minister, Pakistan went backward, not forward. Her husband looted shamelessly and ended up fleeing the country, pursued by the courts. The Islamist threat - which she artfully played both ways - spread like cancer.
But she always knew how to work Westerners - unlike the hapless Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who sought the best for his tormented country but never knew how to package himself.
Military regimes are never appealing to Western sensibilities. Yet, there are desperate hours when they provide the only, slim hope for a country nearing collapse. Democracy is certainly preferable - but, unfortunately, it's not always immediately possible. Like spoiled children, we have to have it now - and damn the consequences.
In Pakistan, the military has its own forms of graft; nonetheless, it remains the least corrupt institution in the country and the only force holding an unnatural state together. In Pakistan back in the '90s, the only people I met who cared a whit about the common man were military officers.
Americans don't like to hear that. But it's the truth.
Bhutto embodied the flaws in Pakistan's political system, not its potential salvation. Both she and her principal rival, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, failed to offer a practical vision for the future - their political feuds were simply about who would divvy up the spoils.
From its founding, Pakistan has been plagued by cults of personality, by personal, feudal loyalties that stymied the development of healthy government institutions (provoking coups by a disgusted military). When she held the reins of government, Bhutto did nothing to steer in a new direction - she merely sought to enhance her personal power.
Now she's dead. And she may finally render her country a genuine service (if cynical party hacks don't try to blame Musharraf for their own benefit). After the inevitable rioting subsides and the spectacular conspiracy theories cool a bit, her murder may galvanize Pakistanis against the Islamist extremists who've never gained great support among voters, but who nonetheless threaten the state's ability to govern.
As a victim of fanaticism, Bhutto may shine as a rallying symbol with a far purer light than she cast while alive. The bitter joke is that, while she was never serious about freedom, women's rights and fighting terrorism, the terrorists took her rhetoric seriously - and killed her for her words, not her actions.
Nothing's going to make Pakistan's political crisis disappear - this crisis may be permanent, subject only to intermittent amelioration. (Our State Department's policy toward Islamabad amounts to a pocket full of platitudes, nostalgia for the 20th century and a liberal version of the white man's burden mindset.)
The one slim hope is that this savage murder will - in the long term - clarify their lot for Pakistan's citizens. The old ways, the old personalities and old parties have failed them catastrophically. The country needs new leaders - who don't think an election victory entitles them to grab what little remains of the national patrimony.
In killing Bhutto, the Islamists over-reached (possibly aided by rogue elements in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, one of the murkiest outfits on this earth). Just as al Qaeda in Iraq overplayed its hand and alienated that country's Sunni Arabs, this assassination may disillusion Pakistanis who lent half an ear to Islamist rhetoric.
A creature of insatiable ambition, Bhutto will now become a martyr. In death, she may pay back some of the enormous debt she owes her country.
viernes, diciembre 28, 2007
miércoles, diciembre 26, 2007
Subsidizing San Marino's Exclusionary Policies - Los Angeles Times
You paid for San Marino to play - Los Angeles Times
You paid for San Marino to play
December 26 2007
The thing about the Grinch was that he came around in the end.No such thing has happened in San Marino, one of California's wealthiest communities, where town leaders discourage nonresidents from using Lacy Park by sticking them with an entrance fee on weekends.
City Manager Matt Ballantyne tells me there has been zero discussion about reviewing the policy, so our only option is to keep the pressure up.As I reported, I wasn't all that steamed about the $4 outsider fee until I discovered the gated park has been upgraded with several hundred thousand dollars in state funds over the years.
In other words, I and other nonresidents have paid for the improvements.Readers by the dozens shared my pique, and one Pasadena resident typified the response."I am outraged that the city receives state money -- I had no idea," wrote Sally Howell, who lives near Lacy Park and has used it for years. Howell believes the fees are charged so Lacy won't become "a park full of brown-skinned people" from Alhambra and El Sereno.
San Marino City Council members insisted that wasn't the case. They told me that despite the substantial relative wealth of residents, city funds are tight because there's virtually no sales tax revenue. They said the park fees, instituted in 1990 and raised from $3 to $4 last month, were to cover the cost of park staff and upkeep.
You may recall that in my first column on this subject, I promised to check with the state parks department to see if it's legal for a city to receive state funds and still charge nonresidents. Patti Keating, a state parks official, researched the matter and told me San Marino is in the clear. She said that despite the city's having received more than $600,000 in state funds for Lacy projects, state code allows a city to charge nonresident fees as long as they are reasonable and not excessive. If that raises your blood pressure, so will the tip I got from three readers:Even federal funds have been used to upgrade Lacy Park.This was confirmed by Elisa Vasquez and Linda Jenkins at the L.A. County Community Development Commission. They told me that San Marino has in the past received nearly $70,000 annually in Community Development Block Grants.Excuse me?
The U.S. Housing and Urban Development website on the block grant program describes it as a way "to provide services to the most vulnerable in our communities" and as "an important tool for helping local governments tackle serious challenges facing their communities."One year, I'm told by Jenkins, San Marino used an unspecified portion of the federal grant for the serious challenge of building an apron around the Lacy Park playground. I guess this was so "the most vulnerable" children of San Marino didn't fall and rip their knickers. As with state money, the federal block grant program allows a city to charge nonresident fees as long as they're reasonable and not excessive, according to Jenkins. But at both the state and federal levels, no legal definition of "reasonable" is provided.
I would therefore like to argue, here in the court of public opinion, that there is nothing demonstrably "reasonable" about the $4 weekend fee at Lacy Park.
Does South Pasadena charge San Marinans and other nonresidents $4 to use the perfectly lovely Garfield Park? No.
Does Los Angeles stick it to nonresidents who use the spectacular Griffith Park? Of course not.
I'm told by Ballantyne that the weekend fee generates $60,000 a year. But the extra part-time staff needed on Saturdays and Sundays costs San Marino only $33,000. With an annual budget of $540,000, it's not as if Lacy is strapped. So how else are we to view the weekend fee but as an attempt to make a public park a private club?
Peggy Ebright wrote to say that as a resident of San Marino for more than 40 years, she's never seen "snobbishness and exclusiveness" in her town.
She argued that the park was trashed by visitors before the fees discouraged large crowds, and I can respect her desire to maintain Lacy as the fine little gem that it is, especially given the limited parking.
But another San Marino resident, Gregory Evans, made the very point I've been hammering away at.
"It is wrong to take federal or state money for park improvements and then to deny access to the public by imposition of an entry fee," wrote Evans, who said he was ashamed by the unfriendly policy.While in San Marino, I noticed that a library was under construction and nearly completed. Will nonresidents be charged an entry fee there, too?Not at all, said the city manager.
And how did the city pay for the library, given its claim that the cupboard is bare?The $16-million project got $9 million in private donations, including $4 million from a single San Marino resident.
The remainder, or about $7 million, came out of the city budget.With all that money floating around, I'm having trouble understanding why Lacy Park needs a nonresident fee -- as well as our state and federal tax dollars -- to stay afloat.
But I'm in a generous mood this holiday season. I think I'll give San Marino city officials a little more time to rethink the policy before I start organizing the bus caravans.
Is overnight camping allowed, I wonder?steve.lopez@latimes.com
You paid for San Marino to play
December 26 2007
The thing about the Grinch was that he came around in the end.No such thing has happened in San Marino, one of California's wealthiest communities, where town leaders discourage nonresidents from using Lacy Park by sticking them with an entrance fee on weekends.
City Manager Matt Ballantyne tells me there has been zero discussion about reviewing the policy, so our only option is to keep the pressure up.As I reported, I wasn't all that steamed about the $4 outsider fee until I discovered the gated park has been upgraded with several hundred thousand dollars in state funds over the years.
In other words, I and other nonresidents have paid for the improvements.Readers by the dozens shared my pique, and one Pasadena resident typified the response."I am outraged that the city receives state money -- I had no idea," wrote Sally Howell, who lives near Lacy Park and has used it for years. Howell believes the fees are charged so Lacy won't become "a park full of brown-skinned people" from Alhambra and El Sereno.
San Marino City Council members insisted that wasn't the case. They told me that despite the substantial relative wealth of residents, city funds are tight because there's virtually no sales tax revenue. They said the park fees, instituted in 1990 and raised from $3 to $4 last month, were to cover the cost of park staff and upkeep.
You may recall that in my first column on this subject, I promised to check with the state parks department to see if it's legal for a city to receive state funds and still charge nonresidents. Patti Keating, a state parks official, researched the matter and told me San Marino is in the clear. She said that despite the city's having received more than $600,000 in state funds for Lacy projects, state code allows a city to charge nonresident fees as long as they are reasonable and not excessive. If that raises your blood pressure, so will the tip I got from three readers:Even federal funds have been used to upgrade Lacy Park.This was confirmed by Elisa Vasquez and Linda Jenkins at the L.A. County Community Development Commission. They told me that San Marino has in the past received nearly $70,000 annually in Community Development Block Grants.Excuse me?
The U.S. Housing and Urban Development website on the block grant program describes it as a way "to provide services to the most vulnerable in our communities" and as "an important tool for helping local governments tackle serious challenges facing their communities."One year, I'm told by Jenkins, San Marino used an unspecified portion of the federal grant for the serious challenge of building an apron around the Lacy Park playground. I guess this was so "the most vulnerable" children of San Marino didn't fall and rip their knickers. As with state money, the federal block grant program allows a city to charge nonresident fees as long as they're reasonable and not excessive, according to Jenkins. But at both the state and federal levels, no legal definition of "reasonable" is provided.
I would therefore like to argue, here in the court of public opinion, that there is nothing demonstrably "reasonable" about the $4 weekend fee at Lacy Park.
Does South Pasadena charge San Marinans and other nonresidents $4 to use the perfectly lovely Garfield Park? No.
Does Los Angeles stick it to nonresidents who use the spectacular Griffith Park? Of course not.
I'm told by Ballantyne that the weekend fee generates $60,000 a year. But the extra part-time staff needed on Saturdays and Sundays costs San Marino only $33,000. With an annual budget of $540,000, it's not as if Lacy is strapped. So how else are we to view the weekend fee but as an attempt to make a public park a private club?
Peggy Ebright wrote to say that as a resident of San Marino for more than 40 years, she's never seen "snobbishness and exclusiveness" in her town.
She argued that the park was trashed by visitors before the fees discouraged large crowds, and I can respect her desire to maintain Lacy as the fine little gem that it is, especially given the limited parking.
But another San Marino resident, Gregory Evans, made the very point I've been hammering away at.
"It is wrong to take federal or state money for park improvements and then to deny access to the public by imposition of an entry fee," wrote Evans, who said he was ashamed by the unfriendly policy.While in San Marino, I noticed that a library was under construction and nearly completed. Will nonresidents be charged an entry fee there, too?Not at all, said the city manager.
And how did the city pay for the library, given its claim that the cupboard is bare?The $16-million project got $9 million in private donations, including $4 million from a single San Marino resident.
The remainder, or about $7 million, came out of the city budget.With all that money floating around, I'm having trouble understanding why Lacy Park needs a nonresident fee -- as well as our state and federal tax dollars -- to stay afloat.
But I'm in a generous mood this holiday season. I think I'll give San Marino city officials a little more time to rethink the policy before I start organizing the bus caravans.
Is overnight camping allowed, I wonder?steve.lopez@latimes.com
miércoles, diciembre 19, 2007
Rush to Judgment - New York Times
So who knows how Hillary will fare in the primaries early next year, and whether (as Maureen Dowd points out in her column below) her looks will play a role in voters' perceptions of her leadership skills and abilities.
It's amazing that in the 21st century, women in politics continue to be held to a standard of beauty and appearance that is to be expected from the entertainment industry. Although it should be noted that some political figures may in fact qualify as "entertainers" for all intents and purposes.
Listening to Simon and Garfunkel on this December morning in Mexico City...
Happy holidays and feliz navidad to all...
Rush to Judgment - New York Times
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 19, 2007
One of my male colleagues was explaining why men age better than women.
“It’s evolutionary,” he said. “As we wear out our wives, who are running around taking care of the kids, we know we’re going to have to get another younger wife, so we stay good-looking.”
He was kidding. (I think.) We were discussing Hillary’s latest hurdle: the Old Hag routine.
When men want to put down a powerful woman in a sexist way, they will say she’s a hag or a nag or a witch or angry or hysterical.
First, the Republicans tried to paint Hillary as angry, but that didn’t work because she has shown a steady composure and laughed a lot (even if the laughter isn’t always connected to people saying anything funny). She has kept her sense of humor — which has a tart side — mostly under wraps, so she won’t be accused of being witchy.
But some conservative pundits who disagree with a woman on matters of policy jump straight into an attack on the woman’s looks or personal life.
And so the inevitable came to pass this week when Rush Limbaugh began riffing about an unflattering picture of Hillary in New Hampshire that Matt Drudge put up on his Web site with the caption, “The Toll of a Campaign.”
“So the question is this,” the radio personality said. “Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?”
Observing that Hillary is stuck with a looks-obsessed culture and that the presidency ages its occupants, including W., Limbaugh observed that “men aging makes them look more authoritative, accomplished, distinguished. Sadly, it’s not that way for women, and they will tell you.”
And Hillary, he noted, “is not going to want to look like she’s getting older, because it will impact poll numbers, it will impact perceptions.” So, he added, “there will have to be steps taken to avoid the appearance of aging.”
He said that voters lean toward attractive men, too, and that since TV, it’s less likely that a bloated “fat-guy” president would get elected — recalling that some were gauging whether Al Gore would run by checking his weight.
Limbaugh finished up with this: “Let me give you a picture, just to think about. ... The campaign is Mitt Romney vs. Hillary Clinton in our quest in this country for visual perfection, hmm?”
Paul Costello, who was an aide to Rosalynn Carter and Kitty Dukakis, calls this “the snake belly of the campaign,” and notes drily: “We’ve been staring at aging white men from the beginning of the democracy.”
Yet it’s true that looks matter in politics, even though Abe Lincoln still ranks as our favorite president. J.F.K.’s tan and Nixon’s 5-o’clock shadow helped turn that 1960 debate in Kennedy’s favor, just as Gore’s waxy orange makeup and condescending mien hurt him in a debate with W.
It is also true that perfecting the outer shell has become an obsession in this country. We’re a nation of Frankensteins and the monster is us. Jennifer Love Hewitt was on the cover of People last week and ended up defending her less svelte pictures with her new fiancé in Hawaii, writing on her Web site: “A size 2 is not fat!”
Women are still scrutinized more critically on their looks, which seem to fluctuate more on camera, depending on lighting, bloating and wardrobe.
Mitt Romney, Barack Obama and John Edwards almost always look good, and pretty much the same, in dark suits or casual wear. Fred Thompson always looks crepuscular and droopy. Often Hillary looks great, and sometimes she looks tired, heavier or puffier. Jim Cole, The Associated Press photographer who took the offending shot, said that there were several other pictures that day where she looked “radiant.”
An older Iowa man, who saw her this week in Le Mars, was impressed. “Hillary is much more handsome — or beautiful — live,” he told The Times’s Jeff Zeleny. “She doesn’t photograph very well.”
Since this is the first time we’ve had a woman who was a serious contender for president, it’s been an adjustment to watch her more changeable looks, and to see the lengths she goes to get the right lighting and to make the right wardrobe choices. She has a much more consistent look than she did as first lady, when she made a dizzying — and disconcerting — array of changes in her hair and style.
Hillary doesn’t have to worry about her face. She has to worry about her mask. Back in the ’92 race, Clinton pollsters devised strategies to humanize her and make her seem more warm and maternal. Fifteen years later, her campaign is devising strategies to humanize her and make her seem more warm and maternal.
The public still has no idea of what part of her is stage-managed and focus-grouped, and what part is legit. It’s pretty pathetic, at this stage of her career, that she has to wage a major offensive, by helicopter and Web testimonials, to make herself appear warm-blooded.
It's amazing that in the 21st century, women in politics continue to be held to a standard of beauty and appearance that is to be expected from the entertainment industry. Although it should be noted that some political figures may in fact qualify as "entertainers" for all intents and purposes.
Listening to Simon and Garfunkel on this December morning in Mexico City...
Happy holidays and feliz navidad to all...
Rush to Judgment - New York Times
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 19, 2007
One of my male colleagues was explaining why men age better than women.
“It’s evolutionary,” he said. “As we wear out our wives, who are running around taking care of the kids, we know we’re going to have to get another younger wife, so we stay good-looking.”
He was kidding. (I think.) We were discussing Hillary’s latest hurdle: the Old Hag routine.
When men want to put down a powerful woman in a sexist way, they will say she’s a hag or a nag or a witch or angry or hysterical.
First, the Republicans tried to paint Hillary as angry, but that didn’t work because she has shown a steady composure and laughed a lot (even if the laughter isn’t always connected to people saying anything funny). She has kept her sense of humor — which has a tart side — mostly under wraps, so she won’t be accused of being witchy.
But some conservative pundits who disagree with a woman on matters of policy jump straight into an attack on the woman’s looks or personal life.
And so the inevitable came to pass this week when Rush Limbaugh began riffing about an unflattering picture of Hillary in New Hampshire that Matt Drudge put up on his Web site with the caption, “The Toll of a Campaign.”
“So the question is this,” the radio personality said. “Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?”
Observing that Hillary is stuck with a looks-obsessed culture and that the presidency ages its occupants, including W., Limbaugh observed that “men aging makes them look more authoritative, accomplished, distinguished. Sadly, it’s not that way for women, and they will tell you.”
And Hillary, he noted, “is not going to want to look like she’s getting older, because it will impact poll numbers, it will impact perceptions.” So, he added, “there will have to be steps taken to avoid the appearance of aging.”
He said that voters lean toward attractive men, too, and that since TV, it’s less likely that a bloated “fat-guy” president would get elected — recalling that some were gauging whether Al Gore would run by checking his weight.
Limbaugh finished up with this: “Let me give you a picture, just to think about. ... The campaign is Mitt Romney vs. Hillary Clinton in our quest in this country for visual perfection, hmm?”
Paul Costello, who was an aide to Rosalynn Carter and Kitty Dukakis, calls this “the snake belly of the campaign,” and notes drily: “We’ve been staring at aging white men from the beginning of the democracy.”
Yet it’s true that looks matter in politics, even though Abe Lincoln still ranks as our favorite president. J.F.K.’s tan and Nixon’s 5-o’clock shadow helped turn that 1960 debate in Kennedy’s favor, just as Gore’s waxy orange makeup and condescending mien hurt him in a debate with W.
It is also true that perfecting the outer shell has become an obsession in this country. We’re a nation of Frankensteins and the monster is us. Jennifer Love Hewitt was on the cover of People last week and ended up defending her less svelte pictures with her new fiancé in Hawaii, writing on her Web site: “A size 2 is not fat!”
Women are still scrutinized more critically on their looks, which seem to fluctuate more on camera, depending on lighting, bloating and wardrobe.
Mitt Romney, Barack Obama and John Edwards almost always look good, and pretty much the same, in dark suits or casual wear. Fred Thompson always looks crepuscular and droopy. Often Hillary looks great, and sometimes she looks tired, heavier or puffier. Jim Cole, The Associated Press photographer who took the offending shot, said that there were several other pictures that day where she looked “radiant.”
An older Iowa man, who saw her this week in Le Mars, was impressed. “Hillary is much more handsome — or beautiful — live,” he told The Times’s Jeff Zeleny. “She doesn’t photograph very well.”
Since this is the first time we’ve had a woman who was a serious contender for president, it’s been an adjustment to watch her more changeable looks, and to see the lengths she goes to get the right lighting and to make the right wardrobe choices. She has a much more consistent look than she did as first lady, when she made a dizzying — and disconcerting — array of changes in her hair and style.
Hillary doesn’t have to worry about her face. She has to worry about her mask. Back in the ’92 race, Clinton pollsters devised strategies to humanize her and make her seem more warm and maternal. Fifteen years later, her campaign is devising strategies to humanize her and make her seem more warm and maternal.
The public still has no idea of what part of her is stage-managed and focus-grouped, and what part is legit. It’s pretty pathetic, at this stage of her career, that she has to wage a major offensive, by helicopter and Web testimonials, to make herself appear warm-blooded.
jueves, diciembre 13, 2007
Guadalupe Spreads Her Theatrical Wings - New York Times
Yesterday, Mexico City celebrated the Virgin de Guadalupe traditions, and little did this Aztec city know that the Virgin de Guadalupe has crossed the border to the north, and that she has become a multicultural icon for thousands of Angelenos, whether Catholic or not, because for some, the Virgin has become a symbol for the City of Angels.
Check out the story below as published on the NY Times.
Guadalupe Spreads Her Theatrical Wings - New York Times
Guadalupe Spreads Her Theatrical Wings
By MIREYA NAVARRO
Published: December 12, 2007
LOS ANGELES — Andrea García Soto, who sings in the choir, was recently found to have breast cancer, so she prayed for her own health. Guillermo García, a dancer, has a terminally ill sister, so he danced to stop her suffering. His wife, Nellie García, another singer in the choir, was simply thankful for past blessings, so she sang to show devotion.
These performers in the play “La Virgen de Guadalupe, Dios Inantzin,” mostly amateurs, take to the stage with very personal agendas. “She came down to the poor people and said there’s hope for everyone,” said Ms. García Soto, 61. “I’m part of everyone, so there’s hope for me.”
A play-with-music in Spanish and the Aztec language Nahuatl, “La Virgen de Guadalupe, Dios Inantzin” has become a two-night holiday tradition at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles. A production of the Latino Theater Company, it is staged on the Thursday and Friday before the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which is Wednesday. But this year, for the first time since it opened at the cathedral in 2002, the play will continue beyond its performances there, moving to the newly renovated Los Angeles Theater Center for seven more shows Thursday through Sunday and Dec. 20 to 22.
“La Virgen” re-enacts the 1531 story of the brown-skinned, Nahuatl-speaking Virgin who offers her embrace to the beleaguered Aztecs in the wake of the conquest by Roman Catholic Spaniards. She appears to an Aztec peasant, Juan Diego, who is not believed when he tells the Spanish bishop that she wants a church built on the hill of Tepeyac. The Virgin fills Juan Diego’s cloak with roses to meet the bishop’s demand for proof, and when he presents the roses to the bishop, the story goes, her image appears imprinted in the cloth.
The 3,000-seat cathedral here, which is only blocks from major cultural centers like the Walt Disney Concert Hall, offers a sprawling stage for the pageantry, which involves more than 100 performers, including 20 children. The cast features 53 dancers in feathered headdresses and ankle bells, as well as the mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzmán of the Los Angeles Opera, who plays the Virgin in four apparitions, including one from the 30-foot-high atrium.
Pope John Paul II named Guadalupe patron saint of the Americas in 1999 and canonized Juan Diego in 2002. While a symbol of Mexican identity, in multiethnic cities like Los Angeles the Virgin of Guadalupe, revered as a protector of the downtrodden, is now a multicultural icon. A procession in her honor this month led by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony drew more than 10,000 devotees, not only Latino but also Vietnamese, Chinese and Filipino.
The audience of about 1,800 people at last Thursday’s opening performance included three priests and a canon from All Saints Episcopal Church in neighboring Pasadena.
“We’re big Guadalupe fans,” said Canon Lydia López, who said she had also visited the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
All Saints’ rector, the Rev. Ed Bacon, called Guadalupe “the center of Angeleno spirituality.”
“God calls us to be bridge builders, and Guadalupe to me is an incarnation of God building bridges between cultures and religions,” he said. “And she does it in a radical way. She appears not to the bishop or a European or even a Christian. She appears to an Indian, a marginalized person.”
The play itself has its genesis in a rebellious act. José Luis Valenzuela, artistic director of the Latino Theater Company and a drama professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, once staged a sleep-in with other members of what was then the Latino Theater Lab to protest the planned closing of the Los Angeles Theater Center, the municipal complex that was the company’s home. (His Latino Theater Company took over the theater last year under a lease from the city.)
For 10 days people from the community took the protesters food, and after the dispute ended, Mr. Valenzuela said, he decided to stage the play as a thank you.
The play, borrowed from a version staged by Luis Valdez at El Teatro Campesino near San Jose, ran on and off in the 1990s at various locations until Mr. Valenzuela took a tour of the cathedral during its construction and asked to stage it there.
At the cathedral, the company has used an adaptation by the writer and actress Evelina Fernández, Mr. Valenzuela’s wife, based on the 16th-century text “The Nican Mopohua” and the translation from Nahuatl to Spanish by Miguel Léon-Portilla.
Mr. Valenzuela said that besides providing a spectacular setting, the cathedral serves to affirm that “it’s our house, we’re inside, and we’re in total command of the space and who we are.” He said he had a political aim with the play, hoping to inspire Latinos to become more assertive.
“It’s so hard for immigrant people to survive in this country,” he said. “Juan Diego had to keep working on it, and he makes the miracle happen through his perseverance. I hope people connect on a personal level to the story and not just from the religious part.”
The play, which started with 50 performers, has more than doubled in size over the last five years. For the 500-seat space at the theater center, Mr. Valenzuela needs to cut the cast by half, but he said he would alternate players so no one is left out.
Sal López, who plays Juan Diego and whose wife and two teenage sons also appear in the play, said his performance was aimed at Latino audiences that may not be able to afford the tickets for holiday shows like “The Nutcracker.” (The cathedral shows were free; at the theater center, tickets are $15 and $28.)
“It’s a gift to our community,” he said.
Ms. Guzmán, the opera singer, who is one of only nine paid actors in the play, has performed as the Virgin seven times.
She said that she had sung all over the world, most recently appearing with Plácido Domingo in the Los Angeles Opera’s “Luisa Fernanda” last summer, but that only after a performance as the Virgin of Guadalupe have people wanted to touch her. It made her so uncomfortable, she said, that she now removes her mantle to take her bows to make sure there’s no confusion.
“It’s the most surreal event,” she said.
Check out the story below as published on the NY Times.
Guadalupe Spreads Her Theatrical Wings - New York Times
Guadalupe Spreads Her Theatrical Wings
By MIREYA NAVARRO
Published: December 12, 2007
LOS ANGELES — Andrea García Soto, who sings in the choir, was recently found to have breast cancer, so she prayed for her own health. Guillermo García, a dancer, has a terminally ill sister, so he danced to stop her suffering. His wife, Nellie García, another singer in the choir, was simply thankful for past blessings, so she sang to show devotion.
These performers in the play “La Virgen de Guadalupe, Dios Inantzin,” mostly amateurs, take to the stage with very personal agendas. “She came down to the poor people and said there’s hope for everyone,” said Ms. García Soto, 61. “I’m part of everyone, so there’s hope for me.”
A play-with-music in Spanish and the Aztec language Nahuatl, “La Virgen de Guadalupe, Dios Inantzin” has become a two-night holiday tradition at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles. A production of the Latino Theater Company, it is staged on the Thursday and Friday before the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which is Wednesday. But this year, for the first time since it opened at the cathedral in 2002, the play will continue beyond its performances there, moving to the newly renovated Los Angeles Theater Center for seven more shows Thursday through Sunday and Dec. 20 to 22.
“La Virgen” re-enacts the 1531 story of the brown-skinned, Nahuatl-speaking Virgin who offers her embrace to the beleaguered Aztecs in the wake of the conquest by Roman Catholic Spaniards. She appears to an Aztec peasant, Juan Diego, who is not believed when he tells the Spanish bishop that she wants a church built on the hill of Tepeyac. The Virgin fills Juan Diego’s cloak with roses to meet the bishop’s demand for proof, and when he presents the roses to the bishop, the story goes, her image appears imprinted in the cloth.
The 3,000-seat cathedral here, which is only blocks from major cultural centers like the Walt Disney Concert Hall, offers a sprawling stage for the pageantry, which involves more than 100 performers, including 20 children. The cast features 53 dancers in feathered headdresses and ankle bells, as well as the mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzmán of the Los Angeles Opera, who plays the Virgin in four apparitions, including one from the 30-foot-high atrium.
Pope John Paul II named Guadalupe patron saint of the Americas in 1999 and canonized Juan Diego in 2002. While a symbol of Mexican identity, in multiethnic cities like Los Angeles the Virgin of Guadalupe, revered as a protector of the downtrodden, is now a multicultural icon. A procession in her honor this month led by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony drew more than 10,000 devotees, not only Latino but also Vietnamese, Chinese and Filipino.
The audience of about 1,800 people at last Thursday’s opening performance included three priests and a canon from All Saints Episcopal Church in neighboring Pasadena.
“We’re big Guadalupe fans,” said Canon Lydia López, who said she had also visited the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
All Saints’ rector, the Rev. Ed Bacon, called Guadalupe “the center of Angeleno spirituality.”
“God calls us to be bridge builders, and Guadalupe to me is an incarnation of God building bridges between cultures and religions,” he said. “And she does it in a radical way. She appears not to the bishop or a European or even a Christian. She appears to an Indian, a marginalized person.”
The play itself has its genesis in a rebellious act. José Luis Valenzuela, artistic director of the Latino Theater Company and a drama professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, once staged a sleep-in with other members of what was then the Latino Theater Lab to protest the planned closing of the Los Angeles Theater Center, the municipal complex that was the company’s home. (His Latino Theater Company took over the theater last year under a lease from the city.)
For 10 days people from the community took the protesters food, and after the dispute ended, Mr. Valenzuela said, he decided to stage the play as a thank you.
The play, borrowed from a version staged by Luis Valdez at El Teatro Campesino near San Jose, ran on and off in the 1990s at various locations until Mr. Valenzuela took a tour of the cathedral during its construction and asked to stage it there.
At the cathedral, the company has used an adaptation by the writer and actress Evelina Fernández, Mr. Valenzuela’s wife, based on the 16th-century text “The Nican Mopohua” and the translation from Nahuatl to Spanish by Miguel Léon-Portilla.
Mr. Valenzuela said that besides providing a spectacular setting, the cathedral serves to affirm that “it’s our house, we’re inside, and we’re in total command of the space and who we are.” He said he had a political aim with the play, hoping to inspire Latinos to become more assertive.
“It’s so hard for immigrant people to survive in this country,” he said. “Juan Diego had to keep working on it, and he makes the miracle happen through his perseverance. I hope people connect on a personal level to the story and not just from the religious part.”
The play, which started with 50 performers, has more than doubled in size over the last five years. For the 500-seat space at the theater center, Mr. Valenzuela needs to cut the cast by half, but he said he would alternate players so no one is left out.
Sal López, who plays Juan Diego and whose wife and two teenage sons also appear in the play, said his performance was aimed at Latino audiences that may not be able to afford the tickets for holiday shows like “The Nutcracker.” (The cathedral shows were free; at the theater center, tickets are $15 and $28.)
“It’s a gift to our community,” he said.
Ms. Guzmán, the opera singer, who is one of only nine paid actors in the play, has performed as the Virgin seven times.
She said that she had sung all over the world, most recently appearing with Plácido Domingo in the Los Angeles Opera’s “Luisa Fernanda” last summer, but that only after a performance as the Virgin of Guadalupe have people wanted to touch her. It made her so uncomfortable, she said, that she now removes her mantle to take her bows to make sure there’s no confusion.
“It’s the most surreal event,” she said.
martes, diciembre 11, 2007
El Sidecar - The Perfect Cocktail...Delivered
So I continue my relentless search for a bar, lounge and/or cantina in Mexico City that can deliver a good, wait, scratch that, that can make "a" Sidecar. Everywhere I go, I start to describe what a Sidecar is, but my problem is that I start describing the literal translation of the word "sidecar" and the minute I mention "una motocicleta" I lose my bartender/waitress, etc. and end up with either a Cuba Libre (una "mentirita") or a Mojito. Not that there's anything wrong with the cubas, mojitos and sometimes micheladas that I end up with. In fact, I drink those drinks and move on with my agenda, and that's that. But sometimes, like today, on a grey Tuesday evening in Mexico City, all I want is a good Sidecar. And where can I head towards in this megalopolis city of 23 million to meet this craving for the mid-week cocktail that will lubricate my brain and prepare it for the posadas, holiday parties, and company events that descend on this 21st century male in mid-December?
In my attempt to promote the basic ingredients for this superb cocktail, I have decided to take matters into my own hands, and like any self-respecting blogger nowadays, I will provide a link to a website that has already described the Sidecar, and go as far as to copy/paste such content here (of course, providing as much credit to such website for their first crack at inventing the wheel, etc.).
With that said, enjoy the following Sidecar lesson:
DrinkBoy Says: Ingedients and Proportions are very important with this drink. Cointreau and fresh squeezed lemon juice are crtical to the Quality of the final product. Add the Brandy, Cointreau, and lemon juice to a shaker with ice, shake well, and strain into a well chilled cocktail glass. You can also wet the rim of the glass with the wedge of lemon, then coat the rim with sugar. Garnish with a twist of lemon peel.
Recently, while talking with Colin Fields, the head bartender at the Bar Hemmingway at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, another very important aspect of the Quality cocktail was brought to my attention by way of the Sidecar. He commented on the importance of the history of a cocktail in order to understand how it was originally intended to be served. While the true origins of many cocktails are lost to the raveges of time, and others suffer from too many contradictory origins, anything that can help you put more behind a cocktail then just its list of ingredients, can help you to add a sense of character to your drinks.
Colin recites that the Sidecar was developed during WWI, when a certain regular cusomer arrived at the Ritz on his motorcycle (replete with sidecar), and asked the bartender for a cocktail that would help take off the chill. The bartender was caught in a delema, a drink to remove a chill would appropriatly be brandy, but brandy was traditionally an after dinner drink, and his patron was wanting something before dinner. So he combined cognac, cointreau, and lemon juice to mix a cocktail whos focus was on the warming qualities of both the brandy, and the cointreau, while the lemon juice added enough of a tartness to make it appropriate as a pre-dinner cocktail. So a properly made sidecar should betray its roots as a drink that warms your palate if not your bones.
As I mentioned already, my own experiments with the Sidecar taught me the importance of ingedients. Lets consider the ingredients of ths cocktail, Brandy, Orange Liquore, Lemon Juice. These ingredients offer a lot of flexibility. For Brandy, we can select from a broad range of qualities, including Cognac, Armagnac, or just a good Quality brandy. For the orange liquore, we can use simple Triple Sec, Orange curaco, Grand Marnier, Cointreau, or a number of others. And for the lemon juice, we can use fresh squeezed, bottled, or (shudder) bottled sour mix.
REMEMBER THE COINTREAU
For my first experiment with the sidecar, I chose to use a middle of the road Brandy, and then test the differences between Cointreau and Triple Sec, and fresh versus bottled lemon juice. My first drink used Cointreau and fresh lemon juice. I was struck by the almost velvety smooth texture of the drink, while still providing the bite of the lemon. It had a certain character that almost begged to be the object of contemplation. A truely enjoyable cocktail.
BEWARE OF THE TRIPLE SEC EFFECT ON YOUR SIDECAR
Next I tried to substitute Triple Sec for the cointreau. My hope was that the lemon juice would silently mask the differences between these two orange liquores, after all cointreau is about three times the cost of many Triple Secs. Unfortunately, my frugal side was going to take a beating on this one. I found the difference to be astounding. The Triple Sec turned this previosly exquisitly wonderful cocktail into just a simple and unassuming drink. The sort of cocktail you might grab off of a full tray that was making its way through the room and absent mindedly sip on it as you chatted politics with a small group of friends.
FRESH LEMON JUICE
Next for my test, was to see if fresh versus bottled lemon juice made enough of a noticeable difference. To give this test as much of a chance to suceed as possible, I switched back to cointreau. My lesson here, was that this varriation was essentially a total waste of my presious cointreau. While my liqour cabinet still stocks Triple Sec, it no longer contains bottled lemon juice.
To help illustrate some of the variations on this classic drink, here are some of the recipes that I found in the books from my cocktail collection:
Old Mr. Boston DeLuxe Official Bartender's GuideNovember, 1946Sidecar Cocktail
Juice 1/4 Lemon
1/2 oz. Old Mr. Boston Triple Sec
1 oz. Old Mr. Boston California Brandy
Shake will [sic.] with cracked Ice and strain into 3 oz. Cocktail glass.
Esquire Drink Book1956
SIDECAR (1)
2/3 Brandy
1/3 Cointreau
Dash of lime juice
Shake with very fine ice; strain into frosty cocktail glass
SIDECAR (2)
(50 Million Frenchmen...)
1/3 lemon juice
1/3 Cointreau
1/3 cognac
Shake with cracked ice; strain
The Perfect Cocktail by Greg Dempsey
1995 Sidecar
1 shot brandy
1/2 shot triple sec
Splash of sour mix
Serve
The Official Harvard Student Agencies Bartending Course 1995 Sidecar
1 oz. five-star brandy
1 oz. triple sec
juice of 1/2 lemon
Shake and strain into a cocktail glass
American BarCharles Schumann 1995 Sidecar
3/4 oz lemon juice
1/4 - 3/4 oz triple sec
1 1/2 oz brandy
Shake well over ice cubes in a shaker, strain into a chilled cocktail glass
Angostura Professional Mixing Guide 1995 Sidecar
1 oz Brandy
1 oz. Triple Sec or Cointreau
1 oz. Lemon Juice
Shake ingredients with cracked ice. Strain into cocktil glass
Bartending for Dummies Ray Foley 1997 Sidecar
1/2 oz. Cointreau
1/2 tsp. Fresh Lemon Juice
1 oz. Brandy
3-4 Ice CubesCombine all ingredients in a shaker and shake vigorously. Strain into chilled cocktail glass.
In my attempt to promote the basic ingredients for this superb cocktail, I have decided to take matters into my own hands, and like any self-respecting blogger nowadays, I will provide a link to a website that has already described the Sidecar, and go as far as to copy/paste such content here (of course, providing as much credit to such website for their first crack at inventing the wheel, etc.).
With that said, enjoy the following Sidecar lesson:
DrinkBoy Says: Ingedients and Proportions are very important with this drink. Cointreau and fresh squeezed lemon juice are crtical to the Quality of the final product. Add the Brandy, Cointreau, and lemon juice to a shaker with ice, shake well, and strain into a well chilled cocktail glass. You can also wet the rim of the glass with the wedge of lemon, then coat the rim with sugar. Garnish with a twist of lemon peel.
Recently, while talking with Colin Fields, the head bartender at the Bar Hemmingway at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, another very important aspect of the Quality cocktail was brought to my attention by way of the Sidecar. He commented on the importance of the history of a cocktail in order to understand how it was originally intended to be served. While the true origins of many cocktails are lost to the raveges of time, and others suffer from too many contradictory origins, anything that can help you put more behind a cocktail then just its list of ingredients, can help you to add a sense of character to your drinks.
Colin recites that the Sidecar was developed during WWI, when a certain regular cusomer arrived at the Ritz on his motorcycle (replete with sidecar), and asked the bartender for a cocktail that would help take off the chill. The bartender was caught in a delema, a drink to remove a chill would appropriatly be brandy, but brandy was traditionally an after dinner drink, and his patron was wanting something before dinner. So he combined cognac, cointreau, and lemon juice to mix a cocktail whos focus was on the warming qualities of both the brandy, and the cointreau, while the lemon juice added enough of a tartness to make it appropriate as a pre-dinner cocktail. So a properly made sidecar should betray its roots as a drink that warms your palate if not your bones.
As I mentioned already, my own experiments with the Sidecar taught me the importance of ingedients. Lets consider the ingredients of ths cocktail, Brandy, Orange Liquore, Lemon Juice. These ingredients offer a lot of flexibility. For Brandy, we can select from a broad range of qualities, including Cognac, Armagnac, or just a good Quality brandy. For the orange liquore, we can use simple Triple Sec, Orange curaco, Grand Marnier, Cointreau, or a number of others. And for the lemon juice, we can use fresh squeezed, bottled, or (shudder) bottled sour mix.
REMEMBER THE COINTREAU
For my first experiment with the sidecar, I chose to use a middle of the road Brandy, and then test the differences between Cointreau and Triple Sec, and fresh versus bottled lemon juice. My first drink used Cointreau and fresh lemon juice. I was struck by the almost velvety smooth texture of the drink, while still providing the bite of the lemon. It had a certain character that almost begged to be the object of contemplation. A truely enjoyable cocktail.
BEWARE OF THE TRIPLE SEC EFFECT ON YOUR SIDECAR
Next I tried to substitute Triple Sec for the cointreau. My hope was that the lemon juice would silently mask the differences between these two orange liquores, after all cointreau is about three times the cost of many Triple Secs. Unfortunately, my frugal side was going to take a beating on this one. I found the difference to be astounding. The Triple Sec turned this previosly exquisitly wonderful cocktail into just a simple and unassuming drink. The sort of cocktail you might grab off of a full tray that was making its way through the room and absent mindedly sip on it as you chatted politics with a small group of friends.
FRESH LEMON JUICE
Next for my test, was to see if fresh versus bottled lemon juice made enough of a noticeable difference. To give this test as much of a chance to suceed as possible, I switched back to cointreau. My lesson here, was that this varriation was essentially a total waste of my presious cointreau. While my liqour cabinet still stocks Triple Sec, it no longer contains bottled lemon juice.
To help illustrate some of the variations on this classic drink, here are some of the recipes that I found in the books from my cocktail collection:
Old Mr. Boston DeLuxe Official Bartender's GuideNovember, 1946Sidecar Cocktail
Juice 1/4 Lemon
1/2 oz. Old Mr. Boston Triple Sec
1 oz. Old Mr. Boston California Brandy
Shake will [sic.] with cracked Ice and strain into 3 oz. Cocktail glass.
Esquire Drink Book1956
SIDECAR (1)
2/3 Brandy
1/3 Cointreau
Dash of lime juice
Shake with very fine ice; strain into frosty cocktail glass
SIDECAR (2)
(50 Million Frenchmen...)
1/3 lemon juice
1/3 Cointreau
1/3 cognac
Shake with cracked ice; strain
The Perfect Cocktail by Greg Dempsey
1995 Sidecar
1 shot brandy
1/2 shot triple sec
Splash of sour mix
Serve
The Official Harvard Student Agencies Bartending Course 1995 Sidecar
1 oz. five-star brandy
1 oz. triple sec
juice of 1/2 lemon
Shake and strain into a cocktail glass
American BarCharles Schumann 1995 Sidecar
3/4 oz lemon juice
1/4 - 3/4 oz triple sec
1 1/2 oz brandy
Shake well over ice cubes in a shaker, strain into a chilled cocktail glass
Angostura Professional Mixing Guide 1995 Sidecar
1 oz Brandy
1 oz. Triple Sec or Cointreau
1 oz. Lemon Juice
Shake ingredients with cracked ice. Strain into cocktil glass
Bartending for Dummies Ray Foley 1997 Sidecar
1/2 oz. Cointreau
1/2 tsp. Fresh Lemon Juice
1 oz. Brandy
3-4 Ice CubesCombine all ingredients in a shaker and shake vigorously. Strain into chilled cocktail glass.
Mexico's Blond Tigress - Rosita Quintana
For those of you looking for great Christmas and/or Hannukah gift ideas, check out these recent DVD releases, as recommended by the NY Times website.
The recommendations feature a prominent filmmaker from Mexico's Golden Age of Cinema, and a more contemporary figure that recently shed light on our very own Inland Empire.
Happy Holidays to all! Feliz Navidad!
New DVDs - New York Times
Luis Buñuel is categorized with the likes of Truffaut and Fellini as a pillar of the art-film establishment of the 1960s and ’70s. But before Buñuel returned to Europe, to make late career masterpieces like “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “Tristana,” he spent almost 20 years in Mexico, working on films that ranged from popular genre pictures to thorny personal projects.
His best movies from the Mexican period blend those two extremes, to the point where a film like “Susana” (1951) could both please matinee audiences with its rip-roaring melodrama and enchant more skeptical viewers with its bizarre imagery, acidic social observation and casual subversion of cherished values.
“Susana” is the third Mexican Buñuel film to come out on the Cinemateca label in the last few months, joining “A Woman Without Love” (1952) and “The Brute” (1953). “Susana” and “The Brute” both fall into what has been retrospectively labeled the “bad girl” genre, a subset of film noir driven by female characters with outsize ids. (Hollywood examples would include Orson Welles’s 1947 “Lady From Shanghai” and Joseph H. Lewis’s 1950 “Gun Crazy.”)
The title character of “Susana” is what advertising of the time would probably have referred to as a “blond tigress,” a voluptuous, man-eating reform school girl (Rosita Quintana), introduced on a dark and stormy night as uniformed attendants toss her into solitary confinement. Moonlight streams through a barred window, casting the shadow of a cross on the floor of her cell (otherwise populated by a Buñuelian menagerie of bats, rats and scurrying insects). She calls upon God (“You made me the way I am!”) to release her into the world, and when she shakes the bars of the window, they miraculously come loose.
After crawling through the mud like a snake, this temptress makes her way to the Edenic ranch of Don Guadalupe (Fernando Soler), where she goes to work not only on the kindly patron, but also on his naïve son Alberto (Luis López Somoza) and his brawny foreman Jesus (Victor Manuel Mendoza). But as crafty as Susana may be, she can’t fool the hacienda’s salt-of-the-earth housekeeper (María Gentil Arcos), whose simple folk wisdom is inextricably intertwined, at least in Buñuel’s eyes, with no small measure of ignorance and intolerance.
Buñuel creates a perfect sense of Brechtian alienation out of his self-conscious use of clichés (from horror movies and the ranchero musical, two of Mexico’s most popular genres) and his distanced, presentational visual style. (The camera stands at a measured interval from the characters, and there is little of the cross-cutting that classical Hollywood uses to knit the viewer into the scene.) Yet Latin American viewers of the time seem to have understood “Susana” as an unproblematic melodrama, at much the same moment North Americans were embracing the chillingly ironic soap operas of Douglas Sirk (“All That Heaven Allows”) as standard-issue tear-jerkers. In such ways do wily artists survive the pressures of the marketplace. (Cinemateca/Facets Video, $24.95, not rated)
TWIN PEAKS
One of Buñuel’s Mexican films was “Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” (1954), starring Dan O’Herlihy, an Irish actor with a resonant stage voice who also appears in six episodes of “Twin Peaks,” the cult television show created by Mark Frost and David Lynch. Mr. O’Herlihy is one of the few real connections between Buñuel and Mr. Lynch, directors who are inevitably coupled as fellow surrealists, though in most respects their work is widely divergent.
Buñuel was among the most sober of filmmakers, who after the youthful experiments of “Un Chien Andalou” (1929) and “L’Age d’Or” (1930), burrowed into a dispassionate depiction of the material world, the better to uncover its hidden irrationality. Mr. Lynch remains a besotted fantasist, building his giddy daydreams from the ground up.
Paramount Home Video has finally been able to gather the scattered elements of “Twin Peaks” into a single, handsomely produced set the company is calling the “Definitive Gold Box Edition.” All 29 episodes and the original pilot are here, following the F.B.I. agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) as he tries to solve the murder of a high school girl, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), in the small Washington State community of the title.
Remastered from previous releases, the film has an impeccable presentation, with crisp images that preserve the series’s odd (and, eventually, thematically significant) reddish tinge, and a new five-channel stereo remix that enhances Mr. Lynch’s typically careful sound design. The broadcast version of the pilot, long unavailable because of rights issues, is here, as is the European release with a different ending, which brings the mystery to a radically premature conclusion.
“Twin Peaks” was a sensation during its first season on ABC (it had its premiere in April 1990) and a bust during its second (1990-91), a decline that Mr. Lynch, in a documentary appended here, attributes to ABC’s insistence that Laura Palmer’s murder be solved. But in reviewing the course of the series, it seems plain that it slowly slipped from the control of its creators, devolving from tight little enigmas (what is that elk’s head doing on the conference room table?) and deadpan delivery into broadly played comedy of the most traditional, television sort: the Miss Twin Peaks contest, for example, with David Lander (Squiggy of “Laverne and Shirley”) as host. Slowly, your suspicion mounts that there is no underlying concept. One non sequitur follows another, leading inexorably to the moment when there is no choice but to bring on a dancing dwarf.
The recommendations feature a prominent filmmaker from Mexico's Golden Age of Cinema, and a more contemporary figure that recently shed light on our very own Inland Empire.
Happy Holidays to all! Feliz Navidad!
New DVDs - New York Times
Luis Buñuel is categorized with the likes of Truffaut and Fellini as a pillar of the art-film establishment of the 1960s and ’70s. But before Buñuel returned to Europe, to make late career masterpieces like “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “Tristana,” he spent almost 20 years in Mexico, working on films that ranged from popular genre pictures to thorny personal projects.
His best movies from the Mexican period blend those two extremes, to the point where a film like “Susana” (1951) could both please matinee audiences with its rip-roaring melodrama and enchant more skeptical viewers with its bizarre imagery, acidic social observation and casual subversion of cherished values.
“Susana” is the third Mexican Buñuel film to come out on the Cinemateca label in the last few months, joining “A Woman Without Love” (1952) and “The Brute” (1953). “Susana” and “The Brute” both fall into what has been retrospectively labeled the “bad girl” genre, a subset of film noir driven by female characters with outsize ids. (Hollywood examples would include Orson Welles’s 1947 “Lady From Shanghai” and Joseph H. Lewis’s 1950 “Gun Crazy.”)
The title character of “Susana” is what advertising of the time would probably have referred to as a “blond tigress,” a voluptuous, man-eating reform school girl (Rosita Quintana), introduced on a dark and stormy night as uniformed attendants toss her into solitary confinement. Moonlight streams through a barred window, casting the shadow of a cross on the floor of her cell (otherwise populated by a Buñuelian menagerie of bats, rats and scurrying insects). She calls upon God (“You made me the way I am!”) to release her into the world, and when she shakes the bars of the window, they miraculously come loose.
After crawling through the mud like a snake, this temptress makes her way to the Edenic ranch of Don Guadalupe (Fernando Soler), where she goes to work not only on the kindly patron, but also on his naïve son Alberto (Luis López Somoza) and his brawny foreman Jesus (Victor Manuel Mendoza). But as crafty as Susana may be, she can’t fool the hacienda’s salt-of-the-earth housekeeper (María Gentil Arcos), whose simple folk wisdom is inextricably intertwined, at least in Buñuel’s eyes, with no small measure of ignorance and intolerance.
Buñuel creates a perfect sense of Brechtian alienation out of his self-conscious use of clichés (from horror movies and the ranchero musical, two of Mexico’s most popular genres) and his distanced, presentational visual style. (The camera stands at a measured interval from the characters, and there is little of the cross-cutting that classical Hollywood uses to knit the viewer into the scene.) Yet Latin American viewers of the time seem to have understood “Susana” as an unproblematic melodrama, at much the same moment North Americans were embracing the chillingly ironic soap operas of Douglas Sirk (“All That Heaven Allows”) as standard-issue tear-jerkers. In such ways do wily artists survive the pressures of the marketplace. (Cinemateca/Facets Video, $24.95, not rated)
TWIN PEAKS
One of Buñuel’s Mexican films was “Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” (1954), starring Dan O’Herlihy, an Irish actor with a resonant stage voice who also appears in six episodes of “Twin Peaks,” the cult television show created by Mark Frost and David Lynch. Mr. O’Herlihy is one of the few real connections between Buñuel and Mr. Lynch, directors who are inevitably coupled as fellow surrealists, though in most respects their work is widely divergent.
Buñuel was among the most sober of filmmakers, who after the youthful experiments of “Un Chien Andalou” (1929) and “L’Age d’Or” (1930), burrowed into a dispassionate depiction of the material world, the better to uncover its hidden irrationality. Mr. Lynch remains a besotted fantasist, building his giddy daydreams from the ground up.
Paramount Home Video has finally been able to gather the scattered elements of “Twin Peaks” into a single, handsomely produced set the company is calling the “Definitive Gold Box Edition.” All 29 episodes and the original pilot are here, following the F.B.I. agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) as he tries to solve the murder of a high school girl, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), in the small Washington State community of the title.
Remastered from previous releases, the film has an impeccable presentation, with crisp images that preserve the series’s odd (and, eventually, thematically significant) reddish tinge, and a new five-channel stereo remix that enhances Mr. Lynch’s typically careful sound design. The broadcast version of the pilot, long unavailable because of rights issues, is here, as is the European release with a different ending, which brings the mystery to a radically premature conclusion.
“Twin Peaks” was a sensation during its first season on ABC (it had its premiere in April 1990) and a bust during its second (1990-91), a decline that Mr. Lynch, in a documentary appended here, attributes to ABC’s insistence that Laura Palmer’s murder be solved. But in reviewing the course of the series, it seems plain that it slowly slipped from the control of its creators, devolving from tight little enigmas (what is that elk’s head doing on the conference room table?) and deadpan delivery into broadly played comedy of the most traditional, television sort: the Miss Twin Peaks contest, for example, with David Lander (Squiggy of “Laverne and Shirley”) as host. Slowly, your suspicion mounts that there is no underlying concept. One non sequitur follows another, leading inexorably to the moment when there is no choice but to bring on a dancing dwarf.
Here Comes Huckabee - LA Times "Huckabee does a flip-flop on Cuba"
Huckabee shifts gears into overdrive as he prepares for his 15 minutes of fame in front of the national spotlight. Letting go of certain "baggage," Huckabee is now bouncing back and pouncing his way to the front of the pack by blasting Castro and illegal immigration.
Check out the article below, as published on the LA Times website.
Huckabee does a flip-flop on Cuba - Los Angeles Times
Huckabee does a flip-flop on Cuba
AP
The top-tier Republican candidate now vows to strangle the regime of Cuban President Fidel Castro.
The GOP candidate now supports a trade embargo against the island nation, a stance sure to satisfy hard-line Cuban exiles.
By Peter Wallsten, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer December 11, 2007
MIAMI -- As governor of Arkansas five years ago, Mike Huckabee joined a bipartisan chorus of politicians who concluded that the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba was bad for businesses. Now that he's a top-tier candidate for president, Huckabee has decided he favors the embargo -- so much so that he vowed Monday to outdo even President Bush in strangling the regime of Cuban President Fidel Castro and punishing those who do business there.It was a change of heart sure to please hard-liners among the Cuban exiles who could make up 10% or more of the electorate in Florida's crucial Jan. 29 Republican primary. But it also reflected the latest move by a once-obscure candidate now grappling with how to transform a burst of momentum into a sustainable bid for the White House.
Huckabee's Cuba flip-flop comes just days after he released a new, hard-line plan on illegal immigration described as "radical" by some of the same immigrant-rights advocates who once lauded him for more liberal views. As governor, Huckabee supported in-state college tuition for children of illegal immigrants and stood up for illegal workers caught in a raid of a meatpacking plant. Now he wants all illegal immigrants to return to their native countries within 120 days.
Huckabee all but acknowledged the political expediency of his shifting views as he stood Monday in a Cuban restaurant in Miami and explained why he wrote a letter to Bush in 2002 describing how the Cuba trade embargo was hurting Arkansas rice growers.
"Rather than seeing it as some huge change, I would call it, rather, the simple reality that I'm running for president of the United States, not for reelection as governor of Arkansas," he said. "I've got to look at this as an issue that touches the whole country."
Huckabee has rocketed to the front of the GOP pack by emphasizing his roots as a plain-spoken Southern Baptist preacher with staunchly conservative views. A CNN survey released Monday puts him in a statistical tie nationally with GOP front-runner Rudolph W. Giuliani. But Huckabee's evolving views on certain issues are giving his rivals for the Republican nomination ammunition as they try to halt his rise. On Monday in Miami, former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee criticized Huckabee for changing his stance on Cuba "on a dime to appeal to a particular group of people right before an election," according to the Associated Press.
The night before -- when the GOP candidates jockeyed to appear toughest on Castro during a debate on the Spanish-language network Univision -- Thompson's campaign gave reporters quotes from Huckabee's 2002 letter. Thompson had hoped to win support from the social conservatives flocking to Huckabee. Huckabee on Monday won an endorsement from Marco Rubio, Florida's Cuban American state House speaker, handing the upstart candidate instant cachet in a community that some of his rivals have been courting for years.
He said his decision was based largely on Huckabee's new views on Cuba. Rubio, who has been wooed by all the major GOP candidates, said he decided to back Huckabee after searching for "someone that will fight for what they truly believe in the depths of their heart."
The letter Huckabee wrote in 2002 reportedly argued that the embargo "continues to harm our own agricultural and business interests here at home and has certainly not helped the people of Cuba." His views on Monday were equally firm in the opposite direction, as he vowed, if elected president, to veto any effort to end the sanctions. Huckabee pledged to adhere to provisions of a 1996 law that would permit U.S. citizens to sue in American courts for property taken from them during the 1959 Cuban revolution. Those lawsuits could threaten European businesses with holdings on the island. Bush and President Clinton have routinely avoided conflict on the issue by suspending those provisions of the 1996 law.
"I really wasn't that aware of a lot of the issues that exist between Cuba and the United States," Huckabee said Monday, adding that his flexibility on policy should be viewed as a good thing.
"I'll be the first to tell you I'm always subject -- and I hope we all are -- to learning, to growing, and never being so stubborn and maybe bull-headed," he said. Huckabee appears to be applying that same approach to his views on immigration, another issue that is important to conservative voters in early GOP contests and an area where he is being attacked by his opponents. Like former New York Mayor Giuliani, Huckabee has long been viewed with admiration among advocates for immigrants. He supported legislation two years ago in Arkansas that would have given in-state tuition to certain children of illegal immigrants. And two years ago he reacted with outrage after federal agents raided an Arkadelphia, Ark., poultry plant and arrested and deported many Mexican workers. Huckabee was incensed that federal authorities had separated many parents from their children, and he called for a White House investigation.
"Our first priority should be to secure our borders. I'm less threatened by people who cross the line to make beds, pick tomatoes, or pluck chickens as I am by people like those in Canada making 3-ton bombs," he said in an e-mail to The Times last year. "While we should certainly enforce the law, we need to prioritize." He called in the e-mail for a "process that avoids amnesty, but does provide a path for workers to become legal by paying a fine, getting in the back of the line to register." But Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant rights group, said he was stunned last week when Huckabee released a new plan calling for all illegal workers to register with federal authorities and return to their native countries within 120 days. Those who did would face no penalty under Huckabee's plan if they later applied to immigrate to or visit the United States. Those who did not return home would be barred, when caught, from future reentry to the United States for 10 years.
"To me, it's like night and day," Sharry said. "One day he's saying children of [illegal] immigrants should go to college, and the next day he's saying there should be mass expulsion."Huckabee on Monday said his anger over the Arkadelphia raid stemmed from the fact that local authorities were not told in advance so they could make preparations for the children who were left alone when their parents were arrested and deported. Often, illegal workers have children who were born on U.S. soil and are therefore citizens. He said raiding a business employing "vast amounts" of illegal workers was a "legitimate thing to do" as long as local officials knew in advance.
peter.wallsten@latimes.com
Check out the article below, as published on the LA Times website.
Huckabee does a flip-flop on Cuba - Los Angeles Times
Huckabee does a flip-flop on Cuba
AP
The top-tier Republican candidate now vows to strangle the regime of Cuban President Fidel Castro.
The GOP candidate now supports a trade embargo against the island nation, a stance sure to satisfy hard-line Cuban exiles.
By Peter Wallsten, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer December 11, 2007
MIAMI -- As governor of Arkansas five years ago, Mike Huckabee joined a bipartisan chorus of politicians who concluded that the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba was bad for businesses. Now that he's a top-tier candidate for president, Huckabee has decided he favors the embargo -- so much so that he vowed Monday to outdo even President Bush in strangling the regime of Cuban President Fidel Castro and punishing those who do business there.It was a change of heart sure to please hard-liners among the Cuban exiles who could make up 10% or more of the electorate in Florida's crucial Jan. 29 Republican primary. But it also reflected the latest move by a once-obscure candidate now grappling with how to transform a burst of momentum into a sustainable bid for the White House.
Huckabee's Cuba flip-flop comes just days after he released a new, hard-line plan on illegal immigration described as "radical" by some of the same immigrant-rights advocates who once lauded him for more liberal views. As governor, Huckabee supported in-state college tuition for children of illegal immigrants and stood up for illegal workers caught in a raid of a meatpacking plant. Now he wants all illegal immigrants to return to their native countries within 120 days.
Huckabee all but acknowledged the political expediency of his shifting views as he stood Monday in a Cuban restaurant in Miami and explained why he wrote a letter to Bush in 2002 describing how the Cuba trade embargo was hurting Arkansas rice growers.
"Rather than seeing it as some huge change, I would call it, rather, the simple reality that I'm running for president of the United States, not for reelection as governor of Arkansas," he said. "I've got to look at this as an issue that touches the whole country."
Huckabee has rocketed to the front of the GOP pack by emphasizing his roots as a plain-spoken Southern Baptist preacher with staunchly conservative views. A CNN survey released Monday puts him in a statistical tie nationally with GOP front-runner Rudolph W. Giuliani. But Huckabee's evolving views on certain issues are giving his rivals for the Republican nomination ammunition as they try to halt his rise. On Monday in Miami, former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee criticized Huckabee for changing his stance on Cuba "on a dime to appeal to a particular group of people right before an election," according to the Associated Press.
The night before -- when the GOP candidates jockeyed to appear toughest on Castro during a debate on the Spanish-language network Univision -- Thompson's campaign gave reporters quotes from Huckabee's 2002 letter. Thompson had hoped to win support from the social conservatives flocking to Huckabee. Huckabee on Monday won an endorsement from Marco Rubio, Florida's Cuban American state House speaker, handing the upstart candidate instant cachet in a community that some of his rivals have been courting for years.
He said his decision was based largely on Huckabee's new views on Cuba. Rubio, who has been wooed by all the major GOP candidates, said he decided to back Huckabee after searching for "someone that will fight for what they truly believe in the depths of their heart."
The letter Huckabee wrote in 2002 reportedly argued that the embargo "continues to harm our own agricultural and business interests here at home and has certainly not helped the people of Cuba." His views on Monday were equally firm in the opposite direction, as he vowed, if elected president, to veto any effort to end the sanctions. Huckabee pledged to adhere to provisions of a 1996 law that would permit U.S. citizens to sue in American courts for property taken from them during the 1959 Cuban revolution. Those lawsuits could threaten European businesses with holdings on the island. Bush and President Clinton have routinely avoided conflict on the issue by suspending those provisions of the 1996 law.
"I really wasn't that aware of a lot of the issues that exist between Cuba and the United States," Huckabee said Monday, adding that his flexibility on policy should be viewed as a good thing.
"I'll be the first to tell you I'm always subject -- and I hope we all are -- to learning, to growing, and never being so stubborn and maybe bull-headed," he said. Huckabee appears to be applying that same approach to his views on immigration, another issue that is important to conservative voters in early GOP contests and an area where he is being attacked by his opponents. Like former New York Mayor Giuliani, Huckabee has long been viewed with admiration among advocates for immigrants. He supported legislation two years ago in Arkansas that would have given in-state tuition to certain children of illegal immigrants. And two years ago he reacted with outrage after federal agents raided an Arkadelphia, Ark., poultry plant and arrested and deported many Mexican workers. Huckabee was incensed that federal authorities had separated many parents from their children, and he called for a White House investigation.
"Our first priority should be to secure our borders. I'm less threatened by people who cross the line to make beds, pick tomatoes, or pluck chickens as I am by people like those in Canada making 3-ton bombs," he said in an e-mail to The Times last year. "While we should certainly enforce the law, we need to prioritize." He called in the e-mail for a "process that avoids amnesty, but does provide a path for workers to become legal by paying a fine, getting in the back of the line to register." But Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant rights group, said he was stunned last week when Huckabee released a new plan calling for all illegal workers to register with federal authorities and return to their native countries within 120 days. Those who did would face no penalty under Huckabee's plan if they later applied to immigrate to or visit the United States. Those who did not return home would be barred, when caught, from future reentry to the United States for 10 years.
"To me, it's like night and day," Sharry said. "One day he's saying children of [illegal] immigrants should go to college, and the next day he's saying there should be mass expulsion."Huckabee on Monday said his anger over the Arkadelphia raid stemmed from the fact that local authorities were not told in advance so they could make preparations for the children who were left alone when their parents were arrested and deported. Often, illegal workers have children who were born on U.S. soil and are therefore citizens. He said raiding a business employing "vast amounts" of illegal workers was a "legitimate thing to do" as long as local officials knew in advance.
peter.wallsten@latimes.com
lunes, diciembre 10, 2007
For The Bipolar Crowds...
Aqui estamos en La Bipolar en Coyoacan.
La comida esta muy rica, y el lugar tiene un ambiente muy similar a un restaurante de un rancho/pueblo chico en la provincia.
Yo ordene una ensalada de jicama con nopales, porque como soy Zacatecano, pues siempre hay que hacer lugar para los nopalitos.
De todas formas, el platillo tenia demasiada jicama, asi que deje la mayoria de la jicama sin tocarla.
Fuimos un grupo grande, y esa noche estaban repavimentando la calle Malintzin, asi que tuvimos que pisar cemento recien puesto para poder entrar a este lugar.
Parece que este lugar ya no se llama La Bipolar, porque aparentemente hubo un malentendimiento entre los inversionistas, etc.
Ademas, aqui les incluyo el link de la revista Chilango, que tambien dio sus dos centavos sobre el lugar, etc. http://www.chilango.com/vidanocturna/todos-historico/la-bipolar
miércoles, diciembre 05, 2007
Who's the Real Pageant Queen of California? Miss Los Angeles loses her crown days later...
There's something fishy about Miss Los Angeles being crowned queen of California and DAYS later being told that Miss Barstow was the real queen.
I agree with Steve Lopez in his LA Times column below that Christina Silva should remain the official Miss California.
See the article below, etc. to learn more about this Barstow fiasco.
"I mean no disrespect to Miss Barstow, nor am I suggesting that her dusty, drive-by town couldn't produce a beauty worthy of the crown. All I'm saying is that until a better explanation of this fiasco is offered, this column will continue to recognize Christina Silva as the official Miss California."
Los Angeles Times
Pageant's lack of class costs points
December 5 2007
Miss Los Angeles aced the swimsuit competition.
Looked great in an evening gown.
Poise?
You be the judge:
When Christina Silva of Koreatown was asked on the final day of the Miss California USA beauty pageant 10 days ago in Los Angeles if she was a leader or a follower, she said:
"I'm a leader. I'm on top and in front."
Silva's adoring family was in attendance at the Orpheum Theatre, sweating it out as she made the cut to the final 15, the final 10, the final five. And then, the impossible dream:
Silva, a 24-year-old actress, was crowned Miss California.
Her first thought: Miss USA or bust!
Imagine, then, the crushing blow that came just four days later. Silva said she was summoned to the Los Angeles home of pageant director Keith Lewis. She thought she would be signing a contract that would open doors to unlimited opportunity. Instead, she was told the unimaginable.
Due to a so-called error in the tabulation of voting by pageant judges, she was not a winner, after all. Nice try and see you later.
Instead, the crown belonged to Miss Barstow, Raquel Beezley, who had been second runner-up.
"It was the shock of my life," says Silva, who didn't understand the explanation that judges' point totals had been accidentally reversed. If that were the case, why wasn't the fifth-place finisher the winner? Silva had to wonder whether the pageant simply preferred Beezley's look, or wanted to reward her for having been on the pageant circuit longer than Silva had.
"I went there with such joy and happiness in my heart, and when I was told I didn't win, I just broke down and cried. My mom held me and I said, 'Why me? Why is this happening?' "
Excellent questions, if you ask me. And here's another: "What kind of Mickey Mouse operation is the pageant, anyway?"
Let's not forget this is all part of some Donald Trump fantasy. His Miss Everything operation includes Miss Universe and Miss USA, and the most interesting news always seems to come out after the winners are crowned. Trump fired one Miss Universe and almost dumped last year's Miss USA when she entered rehab.
How about firing some of the people running the show?
To add insult to injury, Silva says Lewis pushed her to play the role of Miss Congeniality and personally call Miss Barstow to break the news. This would have been like asking Jennifer Aniston to call Angelina Jolie and offer to turn over her wedding ring.
"I'm not going to use the word threatened, but I am going to use the words pressured and manipulated," says Silva, who has since hired an attorney to argue her case.
I'll get to Lewis' response in a moment.
But Silva says he told her she could continue to wear "the crown and the sash, but if this leaks out somehow, your career and your integrity will be completely jeopardized. You don't want to be that kind of girl. You're a girl of faith, right?"
Silva says she had nothing against Beezley, the new winner. So she placed the call and delivered the news.
"It was so difficult, I had to hold back tears," said Silva, who then went home, locked herself in her room and cried for days.
In a statement, the pageant said "a mistake was made by the volunteer accountant who tabulated the votes" on the night in question, the night on which Christina Silva's future looked so gloriously bright.
The release said Silva was told she could keep her crown, the sash, "and the $4,500 Miss California USA necklace," and that she could have her $1,500 entry fee back.
Lewis seems to express surprise that Silva wasn't playing the good sport.
"It is unfortunate that now, several days later, we have heard reports that Miss Silva feels manipulated although she has not returned our calls or e-mails," he says in the news release.
"We support Christina in her quest to seek the truth. At the end of the road she won't find an ounce of discrimination, preferential treatment or impropriety. What she will find is simple human error."
Reached last evening at his home, Lewis said the audience reacted disapprovingly when Silva was announced as the queen of California. He didn't think anything of it, he said, until a judging coordinator told him, "The judges are talking, and they're surprised at the winner."
Lewis said further examination of the ballots revealed that point totals were assigned to the wrong contestants.
Nice going.
This could be the biggest voting scandal since the hanging chads. And, as with Florida in 2000, I'm not even sure what to believe. The more Lewis attempted to explain how it all went wrong, the more confused I got.
How hard can this be?
Hot in Bathing Suit - 5 points.
Frumpy in Bathing Suit - 1 point.
Quick Witted- 5 points.
Barely Verbal - 1 point.
Pencil them in and move on to the next contestant.
Lewis denied telling Silva that refusing to give up the crown would hurt her career, and he still thinks he was right to encourage her to call Miss Barstow with the news.
"My advice to her was to take the high ground," said Lewis. "I think she did the right thing. She cried, I cried."
There's nothing to cry about, Miss Los Angeles.
I mean no disrespect to Miss Barstow, nor am I suggesting that her dusty, drive-by town couldn't produce a beauty worthy of the crown. All I'm saying is that until a better explanation of this fiasco is offered, this column will continue to recognize Christina Silva as the official Miss California.
You got a problem with that, Donald Trump?
steve.lopez@latimes.com
I agree with Steve Lopez in his LA Times column below that Christina Silva should remain the official Miss California.
See the article below, etc. to learn more about this Barstow fiasco.
"I mean no disrespect to Miss Barstow, nor am I suggesting that her dusty, drive-by town couldn't produce a beauty worthy of the crown. All I'm saying is that until a better explanation of this fiasco is offered, this column will continue to recognize Christina Silva as the official Miss California."
Los Angeles Times
Pageant's lack of class costs points
December 5 2007
Miss Los Angeles aced the swimsuit competition.
Looked great in an evening gown.
Poise?
You be the judge:
When Christina Silva of Koreatown was asked on the final day of the Miss California USA beauty pageant 10 days ago in Los Angeles if she was a leader or a follower, she said:
"I'm a leader. I'm on top and in front."
Silva's adoring family was in attendance at the Orpheum Theatre, sweating it out as she made the cut to the final 15, the final 10, the final five. And then, the impossible dream:
Silva, a 24-year-old actress, was crowned Miss California.
Her first thought: Miss USA or bust!
Imagine, then, the crushing blow that came just four days later. Silva said she was summoned to the Los Angeles home of pageant director Keith Lewis. She thought she would be signing a contract that would open doors to unlimited opportunity. Instead, she was told the unimaginable.
Due to a so-called error in the tabulation of voting by pageant judges, she was not a winner, after all. Nice try and see you later.
Instead, the crown belonged to Miss Barstow, Raquel Beezley, who had been second runner-up.
"It was the shock of my life," says Silva, who didn't understand the explanation that judges' point totals had been accidentally reversed. If that were the case, why wasn't the fifth-place finisher the winner? Silva had to wonder whether the pageant simply preferred Beezley's look, or wanted to reward her for having been on the pageant circuit longer than Silva had.
"I went there with such joy and happiness in my heart, and when I was told I didn't win, I just broke down and cried. My mom held me and I said, 'Why me? Why is this happening?' "
Excellent questions, if you ask me. And here's another: "What kind of Mickey Mouse operation is the pageant, anyway?"
Let's not forget this is all part of some Donald Trump fantasy. His Miss Everything operation includes Miss Universe and Miss USA, and the most interesting news always seems to come out after the winners are crowned. Trump fired one Miss Universe and almost dumped last year's Miss USA when she entered rehab.
How about firing some of the people running the show?
To add insult to injury, Silva says Lewis pushed her to play the role of Miss Congeniality and personally call Miss Barstow to break the news. This would have been like asking Jennifer Aniston to call Angelina Jolie and offer to turn over her wedding ring.
"I'm not going to use the word threatened, but I am going to use the words pressured and manipulated," says Silva, who has since hired an attorney to argue her case.
I'll get to Lewis' response in a moment.
But Silva says he told her she could continue to wear "the crown and the sash, but if this leaks out somehow, your career and your integrity will be completely jeopardized. You don't want to be that kind of girl. You're a girl of faith, right?"
Silva says she had nothing against Beezley, the new winner. So she placed the call and delivered the news.
"It was so difficult, I had to hold back tears," said Silva, who then went home, locked herself in her room and cried for days.
In a statement, the pageant said "a mistake was made by the volunteer accountant who tabulated the votes" on the night in question, the night on which Christina Silva's future looked so gloriously bright.
The release said Silva was told she could keep her crown, the sash, "and the $4,500 Miss California USA necklace," and that she could have her $1,500 entry fee back.
Lewis seems to express surprise that Silva wasn't playing the good sport.
"It is unfortunate that now, several days later, we have heard reports that Miss Silva feels manipulated although she has not returned our calls or e-mails," he says in the news release.
"We support Christina in her quest to seek the truth. At the end of the road she won't find an ounce of discrimination, preferential treatment or impropriety. What she will find is simple human error."
Reached last evening at his home, Lewis said the audience reacted disapprovingly when Silva was announced as the queen of California. He didn't think anything of it, he said, until a judging coordinator told him, "The judges are talking, and they're surprised at the winner."
Lewis said further examination of the ballots revealed that point totals were assigned to the wrong contestants.
Nice going.
This could be the biggest voting scandal since the hanging chads. And, as with Florida in 2000, I'm not even sure what to believe. The more Lewis attempted to explain how it all went wrong, the more confused I got.
How hard can this be?
Hot in Bathing Suit - 5 points.
Frumpy in Bathing Suit - 1 point.
Quick Witted- 5 points.
Barely Verbal - 1 point.
Pencil them in and move on to the next contestant.
Lewis denied telling Silva that refusing to give up the crown would hurt her career, and he still thinks he was right to encourage her to call Miss Barstow with the news.
"My advice to her was to take the high ground," said Lewis. "I think she did the right thing. She cried, I cried."
There's nothing to cry about, Miss Los Angeles.
I mean no disrespect to Miss Barstow, nor am I suggesting that her dusty, drive-by town couldn't produce a beauty worthy of the crown. All I'm saying is that until a better explanation of this fiasco is offered, this column will continue to recognize Christina Silva as the official Miss California.
You got a problem with that, Donald Trump?
steve.lopez@latimes.com
martes, diciembre 04, 2007
Reel Migrations: Latinos, Migration and Film
Nice to see Columbia University stepping up the exposure of diverse subject areas in the context of unique film festivals...Nice going ILAS folks!
I used to work at ILAS - the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University.
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University: "Reel Migrations: Latinos, Migration and Film Reel Migrations: Latinos, Migration and Film "
Check out the link, and the various movies that have been showcased this fall at Columbia. I particularly liked the summary for Rosie Perez's film about Boricua culture.
I used to work at ILAS - the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University.
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University: "Reel Migrations: Latinos, Migration and Film Reel Migrations: Latinos, Migration and Film "
Check out the link, and the various movies that have been showcased this fall at Columbia. I particularly liked the summary for Rosie Perez's film about Boricua culture.
lunes, diciembre 03, 2007
Who’s Afraid of Barack Obama? - New York Times
Everyone is looking forward to the Iowa contest, and who knows, perhaps Obama will come up ahead, and make this entire primary process a whole lot more interesting.
I am back from spending the weekend in Acapulco...and am now ready to experience December in Mexico City. Cheers from south of the front-era.
Who’s Afraid of Barack Obama? - New York Times
I am back from spending the weekend in Acapulco...and am now ready to experience December in Mexico City. Cheers from south of the front-era.
Who’s Afraid of Barack Obama? - New York Times
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