April 2009 – Page 2 – Graphic Art, Tortillas, Comics, and Troublemaking

Infinite Youth

April 8, 2009 yanez

This blog revisits an old post on my defunct myspace blog. So much in my life has changed since writing that entry two years ago. SOMArts has gone through so many transformations since the death of Jack Davis and is only now finally returning to stability under the guidance of my homegirl Lex Leifheit.

One thing that hasn’t changed since that night in November 2007 has been my fascination and awe at the first two and a half minutes of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Millenium Mambo. Tonight, hitting shuffle on my itunes brought me to Lim Giong’s A Pure Person and all of my love for the song and Millenium Mambo came flooding back to me. I immediately looked up my old writing on the movie and was shocked to discover that it had been written all the way back in 2007. I summed up my feelings on the song and film that night in the excerpt below:

A Pure Person has been stuck in my mind since I first saw Millennium Mambo as a starving student at Calarts. The visuals of actress Shu Qi propelling herself through that urban passageway combined with the song’s sentimental beat made me obsessed with every detail of it. Without being too pretentious, this opening sums up so much of my life as a 19 and 20 year old. It represents everything that was beautiful and energetic about being young and living in the Mission District. The corridor that Shu Qi walks through in Keelung, Taiwan could have easily been the 24th street BART station to me.

Here are the fleeting two and a half minutes that have moved and inspired me so. I was 21 years old when the film was released and for me, even though it moves in slow motion, no other sequence in film has best captured the energy and spirit of youth than this excerpt of Millenium Mambo.

In my explorations of flickr I have been amazed to see that photographers have voyaged to this passageway and shot pictures of it. My two favorite are below:

If I have ever had one unfulfilled desire as an artist it would be to reimagine this sequence with a Latina in the Mission District. I’ve set it as a goal to complete before I die. If anyone reading this is interested in performing or collaborating with me to make this a reality please let me know.

Peace,

Rio

Latino Images in Fast and Furious

April 5, 2009April 7, 2009 yanez

Yesterday Mariela and I went to see Fast and Furious. She’s a huge fan of Vin Diesel and I wasn’t about to miss any opportunity to see my homegirl Jordana Brewster on the silver screen (I fell madly in love with her after seeing her as international supercriminal Lucy Diamond in the movie D.E.B.S.). After seeing the film my mind was left spinning, there were so many images of Latinos to digest in Fast and Furious. I could write a book on the subject but I’m just going to break you off with something short and digestible.

The last Vin Diesel movie I saw was A Man Apart and after seeing Fast and Furious I can’t help but wonder if any other actor has been responsible for more on screen deaths of Mexicans than he. Both films have record bodycounts of snarreling Mexican drug dealers and anonymous thugs. Is there anyone who has murdered more Mexicans in their film career?

Paul Walker and Anonymous Cholo — "I studied at Julliard to land this role as a cholo. The joke's on me!"

Fast and Furious portrays a fascinating swath of Latino images and quickly establishes what are “good” and “bad” Latinos. The “good” Latinos can be found in scenes taking place in the Dominican Republic and Panama. The music, language dialects, landscapes, and women of those countries are fetishized, objectified, and held up as an example of what is ideal and somewhat innocent.

On the other end of the spectrum are Mexicans, both in the United States and Mexico. They are the “bad” side of Latinos, corrupt, ruthless, back-stabbing, and dirty drug dealers. From the unnamed cholo that Paul Walker hunts down and brutalizes in the beginning of the film to the Mexican main villain and his gang of generically evil and greasy henchmen. The audience is pumped-up to cheer every evil Mexican that dies in a fiery car crash or at the end of a bullet fired by Paul Walker.

Personally, the most heartbreaking element of Fast and Furious is that it’s directed by Justin Lin. In the interviews I’ve read with him he has spoken with much self-awareness and acuity on his experiences as an Asian in the film industry. He was a participant in the documentary The Slanted Screen which critically analyzed images of Asian-American men in Hollywood. He even graduated with his masters from UCLA for crying out loud! If there would be anyone who should know better it’s Justin Lin. Fuck!

Shit is racist,

Rio

Birthday Girl

April 4, 2009 yanez

Birthday Girl

It’s hard to believe that when I met Mariela she was only 19 and I had just turned 20. We were two kids in our second year of college and Mariela was my tenderoni. Today is her 29th birthday and I can’t believe how strong we’re going as two grown-ups navigating the real world. It’s a crazy time of transition for both of us but especially her, Mariela will be graduating with her master’s in less than two months. I’m so proud of her hard work and inspired by the passion she has for her field. Happy Birthday Mariela! I love you.

With all the writing I’ve been doing about animated gifs I couldn’t leave things without a little gaudiness thrown in so here we go!

Happy Birthday!

Rio

Reclaiming the Animated Gif Part 2

April 1, 2009 yanez

I’m all jazzed up with inspiration and ideas tonight after viewing Chicana artist Zulma Aguiar’s latest graphic I’ll Judge You.

In my last post on animated gifs I wrote about their ghetto stigma and about artists like Mariana Rojas who bravely work in the medium. With this installment I thought I’d share some tools in how to create your own animated gif reclamations and interventions. Making animated gifs without access to programs like Photoshop and Illustrator can be tricky but there are websites that allow you to add animated objects and text on top of any .jpg formatted image.

First up is Glitterfy. It’s somewhat barebones in its options but is great for something quick and simple. It allows you to add colored text and a top layer of stars, hearts, and other chingas to your image. Below is something I created using a classic image of Dolores Huerta.

huerta

The text is of course a reference to the countless myspace glitter graphics sites with images like:

The next site is pikipimp. Compared to Glitterfy, pikipimp has a huge amount of options but is poorly organized. The site allows you to layer both static and animated text and objects onto your images. Understanding its interface and organization can take some time but the wealth of possibilities allowed me to create this ghetto-glam remix of Richard Avedon’s portrait of Cesar Chavez.

cchavez The text this time around is an homage to Mickey Avalon lyrics. Images generated through pikipimp come out larger than most sites but the clunky interface means a greater investment of time. Regardless, it’s the site I’ve returned to time and again to get what I want.

So what does it mean when we slather glitter and catch phrases onto our images? Does applying the effects of animated gifs to icons like Chavez and Huerta equalize them with the usual subjects of self, friends, and family? Can we change the meaning of an image by decorating it?

salazaar

When I first started experimenting with these gif generating websites I began by using the most unexpected and unorthodox image I could think of as a test subject. As a Chicano, the most sacred image in my visual lexicon is the 1970 photograph of Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy Tom Wilson murdering journalist Ruben Salazar at the The Silver Dollar Cafe during the Chicano Moratorium march. I wanted to create a critical examination of guady gif aesthetics by applying them to the most profound image I could think of. Does heaping on animated graphics recontextualize the photograph or alter its emotional impact? I’ll let you be the judge.

I believe that by using the medium of animated gifs that we are both speaking to and co-opting working class youth culture. Amongst young poor Brown kids there is no language better universally understood than that of the animated gif. They are masters of myspace semiotics. The democratization of internet graphic tools has so far been pretty crass and vulgar but the access to these tools has provided young Latinos to be fluent in a whole new visual language; one that is not even being discussed in art academia.

So how do we continue to elevate the discussion and challenge what currently exists? Again, I defer to recent self-portraits by Mariana Rojas.