The Null Device

Posts matching tags 'mexico'

2008/3/27

Across Mexico, hundreds of kids gather to beat up emo kids in violent riots. The emo-bashers have come from all walks of life, with other youth fashion tribes (goths, metalheads, mohican punks, Elvis-pompadoured rockabillies) and football fans uniting to whale on a common foe in a spectacularly violent fashion (the word "pogrom" has come up repeatedly in reports). And there is more analysis here:

Anger against the emos has come from many quarters: punks and goths who think emos are ripping off their culture, homophobes who don’t find emos masculine enough, and those who simply seem threatened by a group that is so different than the mainstream.
Here are a couple examples of anti-emo anger from a Mexican website: “I HATE EMOS!!! They are not even people, they are so stupid, they cry over meaningless things…My school is infested with them, I want to kill them all!” and “We’ve never seen all the urban tribes unite against one single tribe before…Emos, their way of thinking is for crap, if you are so depressed please do us all a favor and kill yourselves!”
Meanwhile, anti-emo riots have also taken place in Chile, where emo kids are known, for some reason, as "pokEMOnes". They don't seem to have spread outside of Latin America, though; perhaps the explosion of anti-emo violence (rather than mere mocking comments posted on online forums) is a result of emo and "crying over meaningless things" being a particularly unpardonable infraction against the unwritten codes of masculinity in Latin American machismo?

(via Boing Boing, MeFi) chile culture emo machismo mexico 0

2004/12/25

The bizarre story, with album covers and low-bitrate MP3s, of Yu-Mex, one of the most unlikely musical genres in the history of thrift-shop records. Yu-Mex is what happened when Tito's Yugoslavia broke off relations with the USSR, turned against Russian culture and looked for other ideologically-sound exotic influences, finding them, of all places, in Mexico. And so, sombrero-clad, mustachioed hombres from Slovenia to Serbia put out record after record on the state-run record label Jugoton, with songs with titles like "I Am A True Mexican". (via bOING bOING)

communism exotica kitsch mexico music retro yu-mex yugoslavia 0

2004/2/29

Tonight I went to the ACMI's Latin American Film Festival screening of Santo y Blue Demon contra El Doctor Frankenstein, a 1974 Mexican film pitting two masked wrestlers against a mad scientist abducting women for use in brain-transplant experiments. Taken by itself, it would be just another bad film, only with subtitles. The plot is corny and riddled with holes and the production looks cheap. However, it makes a fascinating cultural artifact. It was one of 60 films made starring Santo ("The Saint"), a famous masked wrestler who became a national hero of sorts in Mexico; other films had him going up against zombies, mummies, Martians, vampires and the like. In some ways, the film is reminiscent of an episode of the old Batman TV series, only grounded in a Latin American culture, which places a premium on honour and chivalry. The sets included the usual sci-fi villain's-lair sets, replete with stylish furniture, sliding doors, shiny metal corridors and "computers" with panels of rhythmically flashing lights, which explode in showers of sparks when hit by a wrestler-thrown henchman. Oh, and the music was fairly typical '70s genre-film music, with theremins and dissonant vibraphones and kettle drums and such. Anyway, it was somewhat amusing in places, though some of that was probably due to the somewhat iffy translation of the subtitles, and much of the rest due to the cross-cultural thing ("look! it's a guy in a suit and a mask sitting in a restaurant!").

The film was introduced by an Australian bloke in a sequined Mexican wrestling mask, who gave a brief history of lucha libre, as the sport is called there, and of the phenomenon that was Santo, which was somewhat interesting.

blue demon film mexico santo 2

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