"Machete" and Mexico - Slices of Real Life

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Category: Laura Blum

Published on Friday, 03 September 2010 15:05

Written by Laura Blum

Machete, the new action flick by Robert Rodriguez, puts the macho – and macha – back in "machete." Steven Seagal, Cheech Marin, Robert De Niro, Don Johnson, Jeff Fahey, Jessica Alba, Michele Rodriguez and Lindsay Lohan are some of the brutes and amazons surrounding pumped star Danny Trejo in this B-film roundup of A-listers.

Dancing blood, 'tude so thick it coagulates – not since Grindhouse has violence seemed so sexy and campy.

As fans of that 2007 Rodriguez-Quentin Tarantino gorefest know, Machete picks up where one of its faux trailers left off. Maiming to rock 'n roll is a mainstay of the Tarantino school of filmmaking, where Rodriguez has long since become co-headmaster.

This latest lesson in lawlessness takes us to the Tex-Mex border for a bead on such political perils as immigration and the drug wars.

We first meet Machete (Trejo), a rogue former Mexican Federale roving the Texan streets after drug lord Torrez (Seagal) cleans house. Political flak and local businessman Benz (Fahey) sics Machete and his killing skills on crooked Senator McLaughlin (De Niro). Betrayed by his contractor and hounded by a vixenish US immigration officer (Alba), the reluctant hitman takes help where he can get it: from his God-fearing brother (Marin); from a gun-slinging rich girl (Lohan); and from a dishy taco vendor (Rodriguez).

Trejo's face alone supplies enough twists. He spooks and charms, droops and rises all at a flick of the mane. A whiff of his jailhouse grit clenches makes you laugh, gasp and wish you too were pushing 66. You'd swear he's a comic book superhero sprung to life.

The punch line of the movie comes at the end, when we're told that two sequels await us: Machete Kills! and Machete Kills Again! Trejo should still be going strong throughout these productions, as should the real-life ferment across the border.

During my own recent jaunt to northern Mexico, I had a chance to hear how the shoot-em-up violence plays out in the daily lives of ordinary citizens. What they wouldn't give for it to be as fun or cool as films like Machete would have them believe.  

Chihuahua-based producer Salvador Valdes told me that the saddest part about "this swamp of madness" is "learning to distrust everybody, and to care only about ourselves." As opposed to the good old days -- not that many years ago -- when people didn't even lock their doors, he no longer regards strangers "as a friend that I haven't yet met, but rather as an enemy that wants to hurt me." Innocence is nostalgia. "We have to play inside, watch out for any stranger or anybody that approaches us on the streets," he said.

A location scout Salvador works with echoes his lament. (She prefers to go unnamed, so let's call her Scout.) Scout described how she has "defriended" many school chums, and not in the Facebook sense. Who can be trusted when, at 1,000 pesos a murder, anyone reared on values of "ambition and greed" can buy what advertisers are selling them? This goes for street sweepers and scions of privileged families alike.  

"Suddenly they began to kill people in broad daylight using weapons of high power, and the words 'hitman' and 'shootings' entered into daily use," she recounted. "First there was the unease of not knowing what's happening and reading news of death and threats…but soon it became normal to see a drug chief in a local convenience store."

"With all these people killing in the streets, it has unleashed insecurity, not just of being caught in the crossfire, but also of being attacked by groups of criminals who'll take your car and then, once you've emptied your bank account, go to your house and at gunpoint in broad daylight take away everything you have worked for."

Businesses too are mobilized for the narco-economy. Scout described the money laundering they're forced to provide and the infamous "installments" they're demanded to pay "to maintain the panic."  

A local university professor we'll dub Prof took me for a spin on the town. One of the first things he did was to check in with his wife, as he does every two hours, whether by voice or text. After work, the young couple tends to stay in, even though this has meant no more singing at night clubs for the missus. "Partying has become more of an extreme sport, because you might run into a balacera," Prof noted, adding that he preferred not "to meet a bullet."  

Pointing to an SUV, he explained that driving a fancy car could either mean that you're a "narcotraficante" or a target, but that anyone using a navigator may as well be saying, "kidnap me!" Prof also regaled me with some chilling tales of the ambushes that have terrorized substance abuse support groups, given how uneager drug lords are for their cadres to detox and spill the beans.

He fondly remembered a period of relative calm that accompanied the pragmatic policies of former governor Patricio Martínez, who let the cartels do their thing without harming civilians. The top cartels, Prof clarified, adhered to an honor code that kept them from hurting a flea outside of the business – while the lesser gangs preyed on the populace to give the cartels a bad name and to try to level the playing field.

Though Salvador, Scout and Prof are hardly fans of the violence, they share with many of their fellow Mexicans an ambivalence about the drug trade. 

As Scout put it, "On the other side there is no denying the importance, not only in Chihuahua but in Mexico, of drug trafficking since it is an important part of the economy. I am not saying that this is good or bad, only that it is a fact that the process by which they take your money and wash it -- using restaurants, shops, brokerage houses and a multitude of business – serves to employ people and influence the economy."

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Just as the drug cartels have more weaponry than the Mexican army, their contribution to the country's coffers is undeniable, and cracking down may not be all it's cranked up to be.  

What would Mexico be like if it just said no to drug revenue? "God knows what would be left from the debris of the catastrophe," said Salvador.

"TV and film are so eager to sell us a society that cares only for money, status quo, consumerism and sex," he rued. It's a sentiment that Scout, Prof and the rest of Sal's entertainment industry friends sharply endorse.  

"Is there any hope?" Sal wondered aloud. The answer I heard from every Mexican I asked: "Go back to our original values."

Meanwhile, Machete should be a big hit around the country.  

High With a Little Help from Woodstock

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Parent Category: Blogs

Category: Laura Blum

Published on Tuesday, 17 August 2010 12:18

Written by Laura Blum

Whatever you're doing, take a break and give yourself some laughter therapy.

Wikipedia tells us the tee-hee "may ensue from jokes, tickling or other stimuli." I'll spare you my joke-telli

ng; nor will I attempt a goochie goo. But I feel compelled to share "other stimuli" in the form of a video that DJ Pete Fornatale screened last night at a salute to rock 'n roll's

first rave. It had the audience howling, and within a click it'll have you yipping too.

The event was "Woodstock 40 Years Later: Featuring Pete Fornatale of WFUV," staged by SobelMedia in its Samsung Experience lair, and the video was "Happy Birthday from Joe Cocker and me."

As you know if you were breathing in 1969, the Grease Band frontman belted his cover of the Beatles' "High With a Little Help from my Friends" to 400,000 of these friends at Max Yasgur's upstate New York farm. The performance was famously incoherent, you'll recall – or not, depending on your 60s cred – so the video you're about to encounter is "captioned for the clear-headed."

Enjoy, and if the counterculture seizes you, head over to Amazon.com and order a copy of Fornatale's Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock. He read us a few excerpts, and if the rest of the book is as entertaining, you're in for a trip.

Peace, Tie-dye and Happiness.

Source: YouTube

Vanishing of the Beings

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Parent Category: Blogs

Category: Laura Blum

Published on Friday, 13 August 2010 19:45

Written by Laura Blum

In gentler times, when someone chirped about "the birds and the bees," it brought to mind winged things swapping life nectars mid-flit. Even the flowers and the trees were doing it.

The new documentary Vanishing of the Bees replaces such lusty affairs with scenarios of falling. Not falling in love. Falling dead.

Equal parts crime mystery, sci-fi and Western, this sobering look at honeybees on the brink of obliteration thrusts quite a sting. Personally, I could do without honey cake, but take fruits, vegetables and nuts off my table and I'll start seriously missing the fuzzy insect. (Alfalfa-fed livestock would go too, though that's not my beef.) Who knew the species pollinates one third of the world's food?  

Like you, I've been catching news bits about “Colony Collapse Disorder," the strange case of bees going poof. But witnessing the empty-hive syndrome from the POV of their beekeeping "parents" is sadder, weirder and more haunting than a sound-byte or report can capture.

At least in the Gulf of Mexico you know where the gob-dripping creatures are. Beekeepers across America and in dozens of other countries, on the other hand, are logging losses of more than 90 percent of their colonies, and haven't the foggiest where they've gone.

My theory is that they've been off stinging Julia Roberts' lips. See Eat, Pray, Love and tell me what you think.  

Vanishing of the Bees played on August 10th at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Filmmakers  George Langworthy and Maryam Henein couldn't make it, so it fell to co-executive producer Peter Heller to entertain the swarm of blown-away viewers at the post-screening reception. I admired his Vanishing business card and its tag line -- "A Documentary for Anyone who Likes to Eat" – which touched off a few marketing ideas.

Maybe you have some of your own. Me, I was thinking: Get the film's narrator, brash Oscar-nominated actress Ellen Page, to mount a Roger & Me-style confrontation with Marijn Dekkers when he takes over this October as CEO of Bayer AG, makers of pesticides implicated in CCD.

Or have people dress up like bees and sell DVDs around the produce sections of our nation's grocery stores. And how about if the Food Channel did an Iron Chef America cook-off using no food? 

Pitch your brief for trumpeting this essential, exceptional film to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Or better yet, pledge funds to the Bee the Change National Campaign at www.kickstarter.com. The filmmakers can also set you up with a screening in your home town. Better hurry, though, if you want to make it by National Honeybee Day, August 22nd.

Regardless of when you see Vanishing of the Bees, it will get under your skin and stay there. On August 12 at yet another head-tickling SobelMedia event in The Samsung Experience, "The future of digital media: How wireless/mobile changes everything," I couldn't help wondering about the hidden perils of our shimmering toys. Amid all the talk of 4G technology and faster, mightier juice, images flooded back to me of poisoned honeybees staggering and stumbling in their flowers.

Afterward I asked panelists Brian Reich of little m media, Ari Zoldan of Quantum and capital advisor Robert Raciti whether, like the honeybees, we too are unwittingly addling our faculties with mediums harmful to life. 

"I don't want brain cancer any more than anyone else," said Reich, "but the known positive benefits that technology offers today significantly outweigh the at-present harmful side effects that we can prove. 

Raciti likewise waived off concerns that "there is much electromagnetic radiation being emitted from your phone," and touted the high frequencies of today's gizmos over yesteryear's lower and reportedly more mischievous frequencies. Apparently the early color TV sets rained down ridiculously more radiation than today's mobile phones.

Waxing Talmudic, Zoldan homed in on a different sort of duality: "Man is in control (and can) refrain from using technology anytime he wants" vs "Man amounts to little more than a pathetic slave to technology."

Both are true, of course, which got me reasoning that if Bayer made aspirin, how bad a company could it really be? 

The following day my head was still pulsing with Reich's comment, "We have dangerous things coursing from the air at all times; it's part of contemporary life, so it's not fair to pick on mobile when everything we do has risks."

For relief I headed over to the microwave- and radiation-free offices of Dr. Edward F. Hutton. Holistic dentistry's leading light was a patient, then associate, of the late orthomolecular physician, Hans Nieper, whose Revolution in Technology, Medicine and Society: Conversion of Gravity Field Energy broke new ground in our understanding of the electricity-cancer connection -- and caused Hutton to break his own ground.  

Some 25 years ago he dug a crater outside his window and filled it with 15 tons of black river rock. Thirty-five thousand dollars later, he had coiled them in copper wire and embedded the resulting "Faraday cage" in the walls of his Fifth Avenue practice. Sucking all the radiation earthward, the rig named for 19th-century English scientist Michael Faraday blocks penetrations of, shall we say, bad vibes, and gives a body a rest.

"Even if we just walk on the street, we're immersed in the soup of electromagnetic fields," said Hutton. "We're basically in a huge microwave oven and we're all slowly but surely getting fried."

If you call for an appointment, the Whole Body crusader will answer you by the window where hedges now cover the quarry. Only there do his radios and telephones get reception. Now that New York City has legalized beekeeping, he could even perk up the space with some hives. At honey-making frequencies, they'd transmit the optimal buzz.