Contra la impunidad del franquismo

video released today in Spain features famous actors telling the stories of just a handful of the hundreds of thousands of disappeared under Franco's dictatorship

Whatever your opinion on bullfighting, this man is elegant

Matador Julio Aparicio leaves hospital after being near-fatally gored. Whatever your opinion on the sport of bullfighting (problematically, I grew up with it and actually really love it) this man is elegant. A few days after being on the verge of death after being gruesomely gored by a bull, he walks out of hospital in full on Sevillian pijo attire. The blue blazer, the crisp button down, and the ASCOT! Such nods to British fashion are common in the garb of Andalusian gentlemen who aspire to look like aristocrats, I noticed while traveling how the all seemed to look like they were at a country estate, about to go on horseback, or were extras in "Brideshead Revisited." Even in 100-degree weather, they were rocking English cut blazers and ties, or better yet, Ascots. They do have an Italian Eurotrash aspect which consists of the slicked back hair referred to as engominado (greased or glued back, I guess in English).

Too Curvy for Shittybank?

This elegant woman claims that she was fired from Shittybank for dressing too provocatively and thus distracting the clients.

Note the fabulous Puerto Rican Neutral pumps - snakeskin.



Note that they pose her in profile, Venus of Hottentot style, the better to racialize her derriere, or, as our National Icon Iris Chacon would refer to it, her "coolan'"



As soon as I saw the pictures, and her creative composite name, Debralee (if you read this blog you know that I am obsessed with Latino and Latin American naming practices), I suspected that this beautiful woman might be Puerto Rican. And I was right, like me, she is the product of a mixed Puerto Rican/European background, in her case, Italian. Her experience at work does not surprise me. I have trouble figuring out what to wear sometimes fearing that my voluptuous figure might make me look provocative. Instead, I might ask myself why do we blame ourselves? I remember a case of a curvy woman who worked at a major museum whose boss (the Director) never once looked at her face in the years she worked there. Literally. At a party, he even brazenly complimented her on her pin (chosen in a vain attempt to close the Diane Von Fursternberg silk wrap dress in the hopes that there would not be too much cleavage showing) as he leered at her chest. Short of dressing in a burka, there's no way to disguise this type of figure fully.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-06-01/news/is-this-woman-too-hot-to-work-in-a-bank?src=newsletter

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There is more to her than just Cuchi-Cuchi

First Lady of France Sought: Must be a Multi-Lingual Neo-Liberal Slut

Sometimes I randomly find a story that hits it out of the park in terms of synergy - political, gossip, and HOLA magazine Eurotrash worlds collide. According to Gawker, someone came across an old video from a show called EUROTRASH (you cannot make this stuff up) hosted by an effete Frenchman and co-hosted that evening by Jean-Paul Gaultier (!!!) with guest star Carla Bruni, now Neo-Liberal Slut First Lady of France and wanna-be Jackie O, then known as an Italian model/starfucker. Her talking-points, besides discussing her sexual resume, were to pitch some phrase books enabling you to hook up with people in various languages. A bedside Berlitz to enable you to seduce your very own walking dictionary. The best is when she whispers melodiously: I want your finger up my ass (or as she says in English finger on my bottom, in a breathy BBC 4 accent) in Italian. Crass as the expression is, she proves my hypothesis that EVERYTHING in Italian sounds like poetry.

http://gawker.com/5547368/carla-bruni-asks-for-a-finger-up-her-butt-in-seven-different-languages

GPS for your Moods?

An NPR story (link below) described new smartphone apps that allow you to plot your moods or answer questions about your perception of your mental/emotional states that are shared with psychiatrists. This type of laundry list, flowchart, quasi-mathematical plotting out of moods, perceptions, and emotions dovetails neatly with the approach taken by psychiatrists (and to a lesser extent, psychologists or psychotherapists) who follow diagnostic criteria that taxonomically fit patients into increasingly Byzantine categories based on allegedly precise symptoms or behaviors. Like the Spanish conquistadors' absurdly intricate and fantastic invented racial categories under the casta system, rendered in series where men, women, and their offspring represented outcomes of intermingling types, the effort to control and define often betrays its own socially constructed nature and slippery outlines. (For an EXCELLENT ethnography of the mental health industry and a nuanced analysis of the construction of the category bi-polar in the mass media, see Emily Martin Bi-polar Expeditions. Mania and Depression in American Culture. Princeton Univ. Press, 2009)

Thanks to our own capitulation to omnipresent surveillance, we may add mental health to the list of 24-7 areas under observation with patients' own acquiescence. In any case, everyone's a psychiatrist these days, thanks to reality TV, we can see any number of kinds of apparently dysfunctional behavior, in some cases the therapy itself is the subject of the show, as in Dr. Drew's franchises, in others it is only part of the drama, as in last week's episode of Real Housewives of New York, where we witnessed what many believed was some kind of breakdown on the part of Kelly Bensimon. Twitter lit up with comments such as, she needs a psychiatrist, she is bi-polar, and she forgot to bring her meds on vacation.

In contrast to other marginalized groups' demands for greater "visibility" as a means to gain recognition and understanding, as in, Ellen came out of the closet and this benefits the LGBT community, with the onset of reality TV shows such as Hoarders: Buried Alive, or its friendlier competitor, Hoarders, the masses feel free to diagnose others freely but without an increase in empathy. And now, in yet another seeming proof of the prescience of Huxley's Brave New World, we will plug into our mood Foursquare or mental GPS, the better to be monitored and perhaps prompted to go get our Soma.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127081326