Taco USA

Interesting. Stopped on page 49

How old is she?

In this article, the books written by the candidates for the presidency of Mexico are discussed: Andrés Manuel López Obrador has written two (“Nuevo proyecto de nación: por el renacimiento de México” and "La mafia que se adueñó de México... y el 2012”. In the latter he decrees that 30 people control the country: “… esta minoría rapaz es la principal responsable de la actual tragedia nacional: la pobreza y el desempleo, la inseguridad y la violencia, la falta de democracia y la violación cotidiana de los derechos de los mexicanos”.); Enrique Peña Nieto has (allegedly) written one, “México, la gran esperanza: un estado eficaz para una democracia de resultados” (this from the man who during the recent Guadalajara Book Fair was asked to name three books that had influenced him, and could only name the Bible (maybe he went to the same school as Governor Rick "Oops" Perry, of Texas); Gabriel Quadri de la Torre is said to have written "distintos libros y publicaciones en materia de medio ambiente y desarrollo sustentable" but it is his running under the banner of the party led by Elba Esther Gordillo Morales, presidenta vitalicia del Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE), a sort of lefty teachers union; Josefina Vazquez Mota, 51, in 1999 wrote "Dios Mío, hazme viuda por favor” (My God, make me a widow, a still-controversial book; Nuestra oportunidad: un México para todos” is her campaign book.

Only the woman has her age given. Huh?

Rudo y Cursi

From the rural banana plantation where they play soccer for the village team to the big city stadiums, two brothers have become rivals and battle each other on opposing sides. When a talent scout gets stranded in their tiny town, brothers Beto and Tato are discovered. They are whisked away to Mexico City to play for the big leagues where they quickly achieve fame. Beto is nicknamed 'Rudo' for his hotheaded goalkeeper style and Tato is called 'Cursi' for his peculiar scoring technique. Success leads to excess. Rudo descends into a quagmire of gambling debt and drug abuse. Cursi is distracted by beautiful women and a second career as a pop singer. Having come so far, will the siblings remember their original goal to build a home for their mother?

 Fine enough film. The 6.7 rating on Imdb.com seems about right.

Che: Part One (The Argentine)

(2008). Nicely done. Familiar story, yet riveting.

La Misma Luna

I wasn't sure if this would work for me, what with the pretty face and all, but I was surprised by it. This is a good movie. Mexicans crossing a river are found by the Migra, and some are separated from the rest of the group. A small boy lives back in his Mexican home, his mother winds up in East LA. He's cared for by his abuelita, and gets a phone call from his mother every Sunday morning at 10. When his abuelita dies, Carlitos decides he'll go and find his mother. He's shown helping a woman who is a sort of broker {Doña Carmen 'La Coyota' } for those hoping to cross the border. That is a topic that is not discussed anywhere, that I know.

Going to a young couple who had contacted Doña Carmen, offering to smuggle peopleacross the border, as they are US citizens, Carlos pays them to smuggle him across. but they are stopped at the border, their nervousness giving them away. Cleared, they go, only to be stopped, and their car impounded, as they have outstanding tickets.

Carlitos loses his money, is almost sold to a child pornographer or pimp, and is rescued by Reyna, a woman who feeds Mexicanaborers who need the help. This is also a topic not commonly discussed; in fact, both are (and aren't).

The movie is a bit of a tear-jerker, and melodramatic, but it works. It is well made, the story flows, and I enjoyed it a lot.

Nobel a platform for outspoken Vargas Llosa

The Nobel Prize in literature brings a long-awaited accolade to Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, and also a new platform for him to assail leftist leaders Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Fidel Castro of Cuba.

Fidel is an anachronism, as he himself recognizes.

Vargas Llosa has regularly directed barbs at Chavez, denouncing him as autocratic. When the novelist visited Venezuela last year to attend a pro-democracy forum, he was stopped by authorities at the airport for nearly two hours. He said he was questioned and told that as a foreigner he didn't "have the right to make political statements" in Venezuela.

What a bunch of mierda. People who are afraid of words are cowards, and will, in the long run, lose.

Chavez disputed that account at the time, saying his critics were putting on a show to discredit his government. Chavez invited Vargas Llosa and other intellectuals to debate on live television, then backed away from a direct debate after critics suggested a one-on-one contest with Vargas Llosa — with equal time for each.

Chávez would look a fool debating Llosa one-on-one. In a gaggle, he could let pandemonium and disorder be his allies, as he usually does.

He burst onto the literary scene in the early 1960s with the novel "The Time of the Hero" (the Spanish title was "La Ciudad y los Perros") — a book that drew on his experiences at a Peruvian military academy and angered the country's military. One thousand copies of the novel were burned by military authorities, with some generals calling the book false and Vargas Llosa a communist.

How ironic. Then again, irony is the stuff of life.

Sin nombre

Sin Nombre, sometimes also known by its international English language title Without Name is an award-winning Spanish language film written and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga , from Focus Features and produced by Amy Kaufman.

Parallel story lines of gang members and Honduran migrants riding the rails to the US border. The violence of the gang is demonstrated in the initiation of a young boy into the gang, in the gang leader's attempted rape of a woman who happens to be a gang member's secret girlfriend, and the robbery of migrants riding on top of a train going north. The film is very well made, and the story is enrapturing. I kept wondering if those who oppose migration into the US would be affected in seeing the determination, courage and grit of those hoping to get into the US to seek a better life.

Under the volcano

Quite strange, though less so than the book. A dissolute Englishman who has just resigned his diplomatic position drinks endlessly, and dies. The story is fine enough, the acting quite good: Albert Finney shines as the drunkard, Jacqueline Bisset is fine enough as a pretty woman, and Anthony Andrews is quite English as Hugh Firmin.

The story is simple enough; the acting and the Mexican settings are what make it work.

Frida

Enjoyed it. Ashley Judd plays Tina Modotti; I only became aware of who Modotti was by weeding the Biography section at HWPL and seeing two books on her.

Five Best: These novels about arduous journeys are transporting, says Rose Tremain

1. As I Lay Dying. William Faulkner. Jonathan Cape, 1930.

The Bundren family, poor white farmers in Mississippi, attempts to keep a pledge to its dead matriarch, Addie, to bury her with her kin a hundred miles away. The coffin is put aboard a mule-drawn wagon, and the Bundrens climb in and set off—just as a storm sweeps in, drenching the travelers and raising the river levels. Every jolt and tip of the cart is felt by the reader in this anguished under­taking, but William Faulkner is charting far more than a hazardous journey. At its core, “As I Lay Dying” is a powerful story of ­domestic entropy, a tale ­perfectly served by its elliptical, multi-voiced narration, in which nobody is ­listening to anybody else. As Addie’s body ­begins to putrefy and buzzards start to circle under the leaden sky, as the wagon is almost lost in the swollen Mississippi, so the secrets and lies of the Bundrens are washed up on some lonely and silent shore, where, still, no individual cry can be heard.

2. Voss. Patrick White. Viking, 1957.

In this novel set in Australia in the 1840s, Johann Voss, a German exile, sets off with a motley team of men to explore the unmapped outback. As he travels deeper into this hostile world, Voss struggles to understand the nature of the sudden and blinding love that overtook him just before his departure, when he fell for Laura Trevelyan, an orphaned young woman shunned in her uncle’s household for her obstinate cleverness. Voss has undertaken his arduous journey in the belief that suffering will make him a saint—a faith that both attracts and repels the men he leads, as it does his beloved. Persecuted by every tribulation the intemperate wilderness can inflict, oppressed by dreams of normality and sexual happiness, surrounded by dying animals and an ­increasingly mutinous crew, Voss stumbles on. Sensing her lover’s torments from afar, Laura—who has taken her dead maid’s child, Mercy, as her own—falls gravely ill with a brain fever. She ­recovers only when all hope for Voss’s return is abandoned. Patrick White, who died in 1990, won the 1973 ­Nobel literature prize and wrote a dozen novels, including “The Living and the Dead” and “The Vivisector,” but “Voss” is his greatest work.

3. Quarantine. Jim Crace. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1957.

Judea. Two thousand years ago. A fat and lazy merchant, Musa, lies dying in a tent, abandoned to “the devil’s fever.” Miri, his ­pregnant wife, prays for her violent husband’s death. But while she’s away digging his grave, a young pilgrim from Galilee arrives at their tent and whispers a blessing to the dying Musa before beginning a 40-day fast in a remote cave. When Miri returns, Musa has recovered. For the Galilean is none other than Jesus of Nazareth. Jim Crace’s brilliant and audacious re-creation of Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness succeeds primarily through incremental invention, lit by unexpected flares of anarchic humor. He gives ­Jesus four pilgrim ­companions, misfits all, rolling the dice at the possibility of rebirth through self-denial. Into Musa’s materialistic mind Crace puts the idea of claiming ownership of the land where the caves are found and ­charging rent for using them. And for Jesus’ suffering the ­author contrives a resolution that is shocking but also, for many readers, deeply satisfying.

4. Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living. Carrie Tiffany. Scribner, 2006.

In 1934, a “farming train” travels across the sparsely populated lands of northern Australia, distributing aid to poor settlers in the form of scientific data on animal feed, crop production and domestic skills. In the train’s ­“sewing car” is a young woman, Jean, whose romantic vision of the world makes her tragically susceptible to men’s desires. Dragged off the train by an impetuous suitor, Roger Pettergree, a soil expert, and married before she has time to imagine her own future, Jean embarks with Pettergree on a long, doomed journey to establish a scientifically managed model farm on land unfit to support it. In this debut novel, Carrie Tiffany shows perfect pitch, creating a world in which drought and vermin combine to snatch all rewards from human endeavour and yet where Jean’s generosity of spirit imbues the meanest artifact with ­transcendent beauty.

5. The Crossing. Cormac McCarthy. Knopf, 1994.

Cormac McCarthy is ­America’s greatest contemporary poet of the wild. His fictional journeys have strange beginnings and desolate endings, confirming man’s smallness in a world where “God sits and conspires in the destruction of what he has been at such pains to ­create,” as McCarthy writes in “The Crossing.” Here, 16-year-old Billy ­Parham, son of a rancher, rescues a she-wolf from a trap one winter’s morning and decides to light out from home, dragging the wolf behind his horse across the border into Mexico. Billy’s intention is to release the wolf into the inaccessible mountains from which she strayed, but by crossing a geographical and temporal border, he enters a world of anarchy and violence. Piece by inevitable piece, he is stripped of everything that gives his life ­sustenance and meaning. Billy’s ­courage in the face of pain, loss, ­hunger and bereavement, no less than his unsentimental understanding of the lives of animals, makes him a ­remarkable and timeless hero. This heroism is, in its turn, heroically served by McCarthy’s dark unraveling ­sentences that gather like storm clouds and break in freakish thunder.

—Ms. Tremain’s novels include ­“Music and Silence” and “The ­Colour.” Her most recent work, “The Road Home,” has just been released in paperback.

Shawshank Redemption

King, Stephen. Different seasons. New York: Viking Press, 1982.

Contents: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank redemption
Apt pupil
The body
The breathing method.
Genre: Horror tales.




















Wikipedia has an article about the film:

The Shawshank Redemption is a 1994 American prison drama film, written and directed by Frank Darabont, based on the Stephen King novella, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. The film stars Tim Robbins as Andrew "Andy" Dufresne and Morgan Freeman as Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding.

The film portrays Andy spending nearly two decades in Shawshank State Prison, a fictional penitentiary in Maine, and his friendship with Red, a fellow inmate. This movie exemplifies the potential gap between initial box office success and ultimate popularity. Despite a lukewarm box office reception that was barely enough to cover its budget, The Shawshank Redemption received favorable reviews from critics and has since enjoyed a remarkable life on cable television, home videotape, DVD and Blu-ray. It continues to be hailed by critics and audiences alike, 15 years after its initial release, and is ranked among the greatest films of all time.

Greatest films of all time.

Mexican Shiva, & Glory Road

Friday night I watched My Mexican Shiva. A patron at HWPL had told me about it months ago; he said friends that lived in retirement in Mexico told him about it. Then it hadn't been released in the US. It's Mexican title is Morirse está en Hebreo, which baffles me: Dying is in Hebrew? I must be translating it incorrectly. Maybe Dying in Hebrew.

Funny, bittersweet, to the point, good, yet falls short just a bit. Moishe dies and his family arrives to sit Shiva. (Not chiva, says one character; Shiva). There are family complications, beginning with the resentment Moishe's daughter, Esther, feels toward Julia Palafox, Moishe's lover. The details are taken care by Jevreman, who ensures proper Jewish custom is followed. The dramas played out during the seven days are sad, funny, poignant, human.

Much better on second viewing; much.

This was recommended to me by Michael Simon as we worked together at the Information Desk yesterday, and talked about basketball. It is a feel-good, hockey, corny story that makes for a good film. The tagline from the studio is: Don Haskins, a future Hall of Fame coach of tiny Texas Western University, bucks convention by simply starting the best players he can find: history's first all-African American lineup. But it is more than that. In the mid 1960s, in El Paso, new coach Haskins recruits seven black players. He drills them, works them, teaches them fundamental basketball, suppresses their fancy footwork and behind-the-back dribbling, sustains them, and, finally, drives them to the national NCAA championship against powerhouse Kentucky University (coached by Adolph Rupp, and one of whose players was Pat Riley).

Good film.

The violin

The violin

Film Movement, and Cámara Carnal Films, written, produced and directed by Francisco Vargas Quevedo.

Interesting, gritty, shot in black and white. Ultimately satisfying.

Corral Falso, Guerrero, Mexico

New Civil War book

Master of War: The Life of General George H. Thomas.
Bobrick, Benson (author).
Feb. 2009. 432p. illus. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, $28


Review:

Bobrick’s admirable biography of Union General George Thomas is the first full-scale treatment in too many years. The scion of a slaveholding Virginia family, Thomas had a distinguished prewar career, including service in the Mexican War and continuously after it until the outbreak of civil war. Alienating his family, he remained in Union service and quickly proved his mettle. His record during the last two years of the war was stellar: an epic stand at Chickamauga, victory at Missionary Ridge, solid work in the Atlanta campaign, and a final decisive victory at Nashville. Possibly the ablest tactician of the war—not to mention one of its most attractive personalities—Thomas failed to receive his due, Bobrick argues, because he failed to write his memoirs (he died on active duty in 1870) and because of the envy of men like Sherman and Grant, both of whom did. Bobrick may not prove his case against Thomas’ superiors, but he certainly persuades us that Thomas deserved the honorific with which the book is titled. Civil War collections, rejoice.

— Roland Green

A recommended Mexican history

Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the fall of Old Mexico. (1994). Thomas, Hugh. New York : Simon & Schuster.

Recommended by a patron.