Someone Didn’t Get The Memo …
by Wes - August 26th, 2010
Spiderman Captured!
by Wes - August 23rd, 2010
The Last Picture Show, and My Family
by Wes - August 21st, 2010
Last night I decided to watch The Last Picture Show. I've never seen it before, but I think I've found my new favorite film of all time.
There's a couple of reasons that this film speaks to me. Firstly, the setting. I grew up in Eastern New Mexico, near the Texas border, and I frequently traveled into West Texas as a kid. My mother's family is from West Texas, ranchers all, so that particular area filled with mesquite, oil derricks and cold wind is nothing new to me. I will say that the film being shot in black and white also adds to the effect the landscape has. To that end, I'd be curious to see No Country For Old Men in a b&w cut.
Secondly, there's the music. Grow up in rural New Mexico with a ranch family and you hear a lot of old country music. We didn't have Garth Brooks, but we sure had Marty Robbins and Hank Williams. This is kind of ironic since I never lived on a ranch. We just had the music around, and whenever we did go to a relative's spread nothing changed. This old, sad country music is very prominent throughout the film, and really captures the essence of what's going on in Anarene.
Lastly, there's the people. I know each and every one of these characters. I grew up in the 1980s, but, as the tag line says, nothing much has changed. Rotting and dying towns are all too plentiful on the New Mexico/Texas border. The football jocks, the wayward strumpet, the down-and-out waitress … cliche as they may be, I know them. Heck, we owned a cafe and probably employed someone that was coming or going on that route.
What really made this film resonate for me was that I could see some of my mother's family's history in it. Set in 1951, The Last Picture Show is about a change in America. It was made in 1971, and was one of the first films to remind people of "the forgotten 50s." The Korean War is big part of the plot. There was a pivotal shift taking place in rural America after World War II. The farm boys were coming home, America was on top of the world, and prosperity was the name of the day. But not everywhere. After the war, cars became ubiquitous and this spelled death to many little towns located on lonely highways and backwater train spurs. Small town ranch life fell apart as people moved to bigger population centers and industrialization continued to ramp up. "The death of the prairie" was already established, and this was just another blow to a lifestyle that was already teetering.
In my family's experience, Daddy Jim and his wife Mama Sybil (my maternal great grandparents) retired from ranching in the late 50s and relocated to Roswell, New Mexico. They had previously lived in Sonora, Texas, as well as the San Angelo area. Raised a lot of kids that way (9), all on ranches. My great aunt actually put together a really fascinating family history on it a few years ago. So watching this film, I kind of understand the circumstances that changed Jim's life. The world he grew up in, the world he raised his kids in, gradually faded away. There were big socio-economic changes underway all across America, and he was ultimately powerless to resist them. As a child, I couldn't comprehend the great shifts that had taken place, what had brought them to where they were today. Seeing this film, even though it is stylized, gives me some insight into the lives of old cowboys and the seeds they planted (in this case, my mother's family) in that era. Listening to 1950s cowboy music gives you some clue, and this film is like a supplemental resource.
On The Similarities Between American Gangsta Rap and Mexican Narcocorridos
by Wes - August 20th, 2010This dude knows his stuff. Well laid out, too. Kudos, sir.
via STREET BONERS and TV CARNAGE by SBTVC on 8/13/10
In the second season of Breaking Bad an episode is introduced by a mariachi band singing about the exploits of Walter White and his chemically perfect meth. I had originally thought that the song was simply written for the show but in fact there is an entire genre of music based around lyrics depicting drug traffickers and cartel hit men as folk heroes in Mexico. These songs are the most accurate depiction of what is happening along the U.S./Mexico border and reflect upon these issues with firsthand experience. The singers of these Mexican drug ballads (or narcocorridos) try to emulate the same image as the traffickers themselves, wearing cowboy attire and often taking pictures with a gun on their hip.
Chalino Sanchez
The Tupac Shakur of this strange mariachi gangster polka scene was Chalino Sanchez. But if you compare the two, Sanchez makes Tupac look like a bitch. Both had multiple murder attempts in their life, but when Sanchez was attacked by a cartel death squad on stage in Coachella California, he pulled out a gun of his own in self-defense, killing two and injuring five. I mean sure, Tupac got shot, East coast West coast, whatever. But he didn’t even manage to shoot anyone back. In my opinion, white suburban kids should be walking around with Chalino Sanchez airbrushed on their XXL black t-shirts instead of Tupac or Biggie. Just like Tupac and Biggie, Sanchez was eventually killed and the murder was never solved. The most recent killing within this musical community was of Sergio Vega, one of the few singers in this genre to experience any success in the United States. Apparently, there were rumors that he had been killed before hand and as a result of announcing these rumors as falsehood in a radio interview; cartels northern Mexico hunted him down and killed him after a dramatic car chase through a small village in Sinaloa.
There are a lot of parallels that can be drawn between gangster rap and narcocorridos. Their creation allowed for more artists preaching a similar message to get noticed. Artists like N.W.A. and Ice-T became bigger within mainstream culture in the late eighties, allowing artists like Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre to thrive in the early nineties. Songs about gang life and drug dealing were simply a reflection of the world around them at the time. After the eighties, the drug trafficking routes through the Caribbean had been cut off by the United States government; as a result the focus was put on the Mexican border as a means of shipping their product into the U.S. This caused a massive wave of violence and turmoil in Mexico that goes on to this day. This has caused for Mexican narcocorridos to have a new relevance near the border. In fact, once these songs made it into the U.S. it didn’t take long for them to get banned from the airwaves like they were singing “Fuck the Police” or some shit. The other side of this is the influence the music has had on youth within the area. Old white people in Washington blamed the crack epidemic on rap groups that were apparently promoting a criminal lifestyle and a similar judgment has been made towards their Mexican counter parts. Narcocorridos have been banned from the airwaves throughout the Southwest for the same reasons. It’s pretty obvious that although there is some influence from the music, poverty is the biggest motivator.
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Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman
Head of the Sinaloa Cartel, was ranked 41st on the list of most powerful people in the world by Forbes and was counted as the 701st richest person in the world, listed among people like the Prime Minister of Pakistan and the heir to the Campbell Soup empire. With numbers like this it is obvious that drug culture is what‘s causing the creation of mariachi music, instead of vice versa. Music is simply a reflection of what is happening around the people producing it and to say that they are the cause of it is illogical. It’s not as if these musicians (be it gangster rappers or the singers of narcocorridos) are creating these issues, because if these problems in society didn’t already exist there would be nothing for them to write about and N.W.A. would have never caused the Focus on the Family organization to piss themselves. To think that a rap group was put on the FBI watch list is absurd in hindsight, but it adds mythology to the genre and they definitely sold a couple million records as a result. Ultimately, the government and different religious organizations will always use music as a scapegoat for problems they are often the cause of. By blaming N.W.A. for the rise in gang activity and banning narcocorridos from the airwaves to quell the influx of drugs into the U.S. the government takes the responsibility of solving these problems off their shoulders. It’s a pretty weak tactic that rarely fools anyone other than the same demographic that voted for Bush, twice.
-ALEX ROIBAS