No update this week -- instead I'd like to refer you to a very interesting column from the Santa Barbara Noozhawk, a favorite independent site.
What do you think of their approach?
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Weeds running rampant
In Weeds' first season on Showtime, Jenji Kohan took an offbeat look at marijuana in Agrestic, an upscale Southern California subdivision of pseudo-Spanish houses. A suddenly widowed young soccer mom, Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise Parker), plunges into dealing so she can keep herself and her family of two boys in the affluent style to which they have been accustomed.
Her customers include an accountant and city councilman, Doug Wilson (Kevin Nealon), his attorney pal Dean Hodes (Andy Milder), and students at nearby Valley College.
Nancy's adventures with her supplier and expanding her business share the spotlight with the consumerism and competition of a town where everybody seems to be friends and enemies simultaneously. Celia Hodes (Elizabeth Perkins) supplies much of that melodramatic energy as PTA president and a very mean-spirited mother.
It was Showtime's highest-rated series in its first year. If only it had quit then.
By the time the fifth season ended, it had become very dark, a series of murders, rapes, shootouts and intrigues of violent rival cartels and Mexican politics.
Nancy, who had earlier married a DEA agent who was soon killed, now has had a baby by and is married to a Mexican drug kingpin and politician, Esteban Reyes. played by Demian Bichir, who's known as the George Clooney of Mexico. He's the mayor of Tijuana and running for governor. His glamorous woman campaign manager has threatened to have her older two sons killed, because "we don't need them for our pretty pictures." One of those sons promptly bashed her in the head with a croquet mallet and we last saw her face down in a swimming pool, blood spreading.
Season six is due to start airing in July. Can it possibly still be funny when we know that 18,000 people have died in the drug wars since the end of 2006 when Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war against cartels? When we know the violence is no longer confined to the border towns? It has escalated, just as the Weeds plot and sub-plots have.
For a comedy, it has become seriously not funny. There doesn't seem to be any logical way to end this saga except operatically, with corpses littering the screen.
Nancy's adventures with her supplier and expanding her business share the spotlight with the consumerism and competition of a town where everybody seems to be friends and enemies simultaneously. Celia Hodes (Elizabeth Perkins) supplies much of that melodramatic energy as PTA president and a very mean-spirited mother.
It was Showtime's highest-rated series in its first year. If only it had quit then.
By the time the fifth season ended, it had become very dark, a series of murders, rapes, shootouts and intrigues of violent rival cartels and Mexican politics.
Season six is due to start airing in July. Can it possibly still be funny when we know that 18,000 people have died in the drug wars since the end of 2006 when Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war against cartels? When we know the violence is no longer confined to the border towns? It has escalated, just as the Weeds plot and sub-plots have.
For a comedy, it has become seriously not funny. There doesn't seem to be any logical way to end this saga except operatically, with corpses littering the screen.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Saludes, San Patricio!
Maybe you're waiting until Wednesday to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, but they've already started the annual week-long party in San Patricio, Jalisco, on Mexico's Pacific coast. This year they may be listening to the new Chieftains album San Patricio, a fusion of Irish and Mexican music.
http://www.irishcentral.com/IrishAmerica/The-March-of-the-Forgotten-87237152.html?page=1
The visiting gringos are certainly drinking Jamieson's and getting misty-eyed as they retell the story of the brave Irish martyrs who fought with Mexico in the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848. Like so much of conventional wisdom, quite a bit of it is wrong, or at least questionable.
“No, the San Patricio soldiers couldn't have settled in the town. None of them survived,” a Mexican scholar told me. But some did,escaping the fate of being hanged as deserters by the United States Army. There may have been only a handful, but a few of them accepted the Mexican government's offer of land grants and quietly settled into the country.
The popular story, as recounted in the movie One Man's Hero, is that when the Irish soldiers entered Mexico with the U.S. Army they found themselves fighting people just like themselves: Catholic villagers. And so they defected to the Mexican Army, which would be led by General Santa Anna, who had conquered the Alamo 10 years earlier.
And why were there Irish in the U.S. Army? They had come to America to escape famine at home, booking passage on a ship to New Orleans because the fare was cheaper than to other ports such as New York. There was little work available, and much resentment, and so they joined the Army in Texas.
The deserters weren't all Irish. The Saint Patrick's Battalion (Batallón de San Patricio) included Canadians, Scots, English and several European nationalities, as well as some African-Americans who had escaped slavery in the South; one of the issues in that war was the Texan desire to maintain slavery and the Mexican ban on it. Mexico offered more incentives than sentimental attachment to villages and religion – citizenship, higher pay and promises of land. There may have been as few as 175, or as many as several hundred. (There's that slippery history again.) Mexico has long honored the battalion in ceremonies in Mexico City's San Jacinto Plaza on September 12, the anniversary of the executions. In 1997 then-President Ernesto Zedillo commemorated the 150th anniversary of the executions.
Besides the truly awful One Man's Hero,there are a few other page and screen sources of this little-known chapter of history. Some claim the story was suppressed by the United States government,which may be true.
The Irish in America, a History Channel production available at Blockbuster and Amazon.
PBS also did a series called the Irish in America. Unfortunately, the site has been retired.
Shamrock and Sword: The Saint Patrick's Battalion in the U.S.-Mexican War, author Robert Ryal Miller, history.
50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed to Know: by Mickey Z, political history.
Saint Patrick's Battalion, by Carl Krueger, historical novel.
The only San Patricio in Mexico (which tends to give many towns the same name), it's properly known as San Patricio-Melaque-Barra de Navidad. The three towns face the Bahia de Navidad and are deservedly popular as a destination for snowbirds and Mexican tourists, for their natural beauty and great variety of accommodations and restaurants.
Melaque also seems to be the only town of its name in the Republic. Some say it's a derivation of malarkey, slang for nonsense, probably a British origin. (And maybe it's from a pre-conquest indigenous language.) Some also say that gringo is derived from the song Green Grow the Rushes, O, by the Scottish poet Robert Burns, sung by the surviving soldiers as they marched along the beach. More on that theory at http://celtic-cadences.blog.co.uk/2009/07/17/green-grow-the-rashes-o-lyrics-robert-burns-texas-scotland-mexican-gringo-american-ancestry-genealogy-6535224/
A pretty story, isn't it?
If you're looking for more light-hearted Irish movies, check the January post Irish spring some surprises.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Who should we celebrate this month?
You've probably heard that March is International Women's Month. In the United States we are invited to a lot of events celebrating that and urging more attention to women's rights and accomplishments, but maybe we need to look at some other things.
"We don't want a bigger piece of the pie. The pie is poisoned," author Kate Millett told a gathering of California feminists in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, out in the halls, noisy wrangling was going on over whether the group was dominated by middle-class white women and ignoring women of color, the working class and lesbians. It was.
Around the world, women don't seem to be trying to crack the glass ceiling in politics and corporations; too many are just trying to survive. Several of their stories are told in the 2004 documentary film The Corporation. The filmmakers have generously posted the entire film at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FA50FBC214A6CE87 and it's available from Netflix or for purchase or lease from http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/ both for private use and for public showings. It's also on Hulu, with limited commercial interruptions, http://www.hulu.com/watch/118169/the-corporation
In India, women have led the fight to end laws against saving crop seeds. Dr. Vandana Shiva, a physicist, is a leader in that effort to preserve an ancient and money-saving tradition and in making water available without corporate control. See her interview with Bill Moyers at www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_shiva.html
In Canada, Maude Barlow has been leading the water fight for many years and opposing free trade agreements which let global corporations control the necessities of life. Grit TV has a good recent interview with her: http://www.grittv.org/2010/02/24/maude-barlow-water-on-the-brain/
By far the most compelling interviews in the film are with the teenage girls who work in sweatshops for U.S-based corporations making our clothes for pennies a day. In 1996, when a human rights organization visited a Honduras sweatshop owned by actress Kathie Lee Gifford, intimidating company security men watched the interviews. The girls surreptitiously gave their pay stubs to the visitors, which led to a federal investigation. Whether Gifford is still exploiting child workers is in dispute, but there's no question that many clothing manufacturers continue to do so.
It's not all bad news. Carpet manufacturer Ray Anderson of Interface Carpets is a convert to sustainability, and has called himself “a plunderer” of resources in speeches to other industrial leaders. He has also reported that the company is doing very well with its new environmentally friendly practices. We need to educate and encourage more men like him, help them to make better pies.
"We don't want a bigger piece of the pie. The pie is poisoned," author Kate Millett told a gathering of California feminists in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, out in the halls, noisy wrangling was going on over whether the group was dominated by middle-class white women and ignoring women of color, the working class and lesbians. It was.
Around the world, women don't seem to be trying to crack the glass ceiling in politics and corporations; too many are just trying to survive. Several of their stories are told in the 2004 documentary film The Corporation. The filmmakers have generously posted the entire film at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FA50FBC214A6CE87 and it's available from Netflix or for purchase or lease from http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/ both for private use and for public showings. It's also on Hulu, with limited commercial interruptions, http://www.hulu.com/watch/118169/the-corporation
By far the most compelling interviews in the film are with the teenage girls who work in sweatshops for U.S-based corporations making our clothes for pennies a day. In 1996, when a human rights organization visited a Honduras sweatshop owned by actress Kathie Lee Gifford, intimidating company security men watched the interviews. The girls surreptitiously gave their pay stubs to the visitors, which led to a federal investigation. Whether Gifford is still exploiting child workers is in dispute, but there's no question that many clothing manufacturers continue to do so.
It's not all bad news. Carpet manufacturer Ray Anderson of Interface Carpets is a convert to sustainability, and has called himself “a plunderer” of resources in speeches to other industrial leaders. He has also reported that the company is doing very well with its new environmentally friendly practices. We need to educate and encourage more men like him, help them to make better pies.
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