Mexico

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British ambassador to Mexico sacked after pointing gun at embassy employee​

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The rest of the article's nuts. Imagine if this was what campaigning was like over here...

The campaign trail has been blighted by violence, with more than 30 candidates killed and hundreds more dropping out as organised crime groups vie to install friendly leaders.

On Wednesday – the final day of the campaign – a gunman filmed himself shooting dead the opposition mayoral candidate José Alfredo Cabrera in the town of Coyuca de Benítez, Guerrero, before in turn being gunned down by bodyguards.
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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Mental. Looks like a still from a Verhoeven film.

And if that's what 'friendly' politicians in Mexico are like, then how bad are the unfriendly ones?
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

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Pedro Paramo's great, so atmospheric and ghostly in a uniquely Mexican death-obsessed way. Not sure how well it would translate though. The short stories are great too, but really, really harsh and depressing.
 
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ver$hy ver$h said:

“If You Could Die…”: Hart Crane’s “Accursed Share” in Mexico

Born in the Midwest and living in New York City, Hart Crane is less known for his connections with the South, his travels to Florida, Cuba and the Isle of Pines in his family estate. A poet in the ...
journals.openedition.org journals.openedition.org
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Benny Bunter said:
Pedro Paramo's great, so atmospheric and ghostly in a uniquely Mexican death-obsessed way. Not sure how well it would translate though. The short stories are great too, but really, really harsh and depressing.
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I find the whole death/Mexico thing intriguing. They have all that Day of the Dead stuff, but there's also a clear element of white people exoticising it and viewing the place as some cursed land for them to adventure through. See: the following from the Hart Crane essay.

Crane also became acquainted with his own chaotic and sacrificial self who died in the Gulf of Mexico a few months later. Meaning to leave behind a “mad, rushing crowd up north,” he unconsciously recovered an even sicker South. “Mexico was a sick country” he would admit to his friend Waldo Frank, who must have been the agent of Crane’s interest for Mexico and most feared for him when he left: “He had read my America Hispana, and wanted to do something on Montezuma.… And I was afraid. I knew Mexico very well, and I knew how strong the death wish was in Mexico. I knew there was a dark side to all that had come out of the Aztec civilization”​
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Another Guggenheim recipient, painter Marsden Hartley who arrived in Mexico a month before Crane left, and was deeply shaken by his suicide, believed the country to be primarily responsible for it. Gradually exhausted by Mexico, he later believed it to be “the one place I shall always think of as wrong for me... It is a place... [where] the light will wear you down, the air will fatigue, height will oppress.... Perhaps you can learn the secret of all the dark living but you will change your whole being to do it.”​
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I think pretty much every piece of media I've encountered about Mexico has been about blood, death, criminals, people going down there to die, people on the run. Crane, Burroughs, Breaking Bad, Blood Meridian, Bataille, Sicario, Narcos, Under the Volcano, Ellroy's Black Dahlia, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Robert Rodriguez's films, Apocalypto, Against the Day. It's little more than a graveyard in the white imaginary.
 
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sus said:
The Aztecs and Mayans are a thorn in the side of both (1) psych-head hippies who insist that if only everyone dropped acid, we'd live in a peaceful utopia,(2) history-revising anti-imperialists, who insist that the white race is a uniquely oppressive cancer that decimated a pacifist indigenous population.

In reality, Mesoamerica was ruled by brutal imperialist regimes, and their extinction is not a tragedy (although certainly the destruction of their cultural artifacts, and the deaths of individual natives in slavery or disease, are tragedies). History is a long sequence of big fish getting eaten by even bigger fish. Degrowth and disarmament aren't stable equilibria, someone will always defect and seize power. Wield power or be disempowered.
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Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

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ver$hy ver$h said:
Maybe I should finally read Pedro Paramo.
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Dug my copy out and getting sucked in again - I've never read anything quite like it. It flits backwards and forwards in time, so you often don't know who's speaking, when the events are happening, what's real or just a hallucination, or even which characters are alive or dead.
 
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Benny Bunter said:
Dug my copy out and getting sucked in again - I've never read anything quite like it. It flits backwards and forwards in time, so you often don't know who's speaking, when the events are happening, what's real or just a hallucination, or even which characters are alive or dead.
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Someone did a new English translation recently, think mine's an earlier one. Are you reading it in Spanish?
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

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Yeah, I've read it a couple of times before but a long time ago now. My spanish is much better now, plus I'd made loads of notes in the margins of my copy so I should get more out of it this time. It's really short and the language is very simple, but it's so fragmented and the chronology jumps all over the place, so that it's kind of hard to follow on first reading.
 
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