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Feb 10 2009
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Tóxico Reviews, Work from Mexico

LOS FAVORITOS DE AMBULANTE

Como probablemente estén enterados si viven en México, ya empezó Ambulante, un gran festival de documentales: cuarenta y cuatro documentales (mexicanos y extranjeros), en esta ocasión, para ser exactos.

Y Elena Fortes–la directora de Ambulante–ayer le dió a Tóxico su lista de cinco películas favoritas para esta edición:

Encuentros en el fin del mundo (Werner Herzog)
Los exiliados (Kent Mackenzie)
Emerald (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Presunto culpable (Roberto Hernández)
La vida moderna (Raymond Depardon)

Más info en la página oficial del festival.

(Gracias Elena.)

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Oct 08 2008
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Tóxico Reviews

HAD COFFEE THIS MORNING BY THE PARK AND READ THE NEWSPAPER WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI READING OVER MY SHOULDER

“There isn’t the slightest operation, the slightest industrial or financial mechanism that does not reveal the dementia of the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its rationality (not at all a false rationality, but a true rationality of this pathology, of this madness, for the machine does work, be sure of it). There is no danger of this machine going mad, it has been mad from the beginning and that’s where its rationality comes from.”

-Deleuze and Guattari-

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Jul 26 2008
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Tóxico Reviews

ALL KNOWN METAL BANDS

All Known Metal Bands is a book. It contains the name of over 50,000 metal bands, a quote and an epilogue. Many will find it completely useless. Others will deem it utterly hilarious. Some take it seriously.

All I know is that you’ve got to admit there’s something very special about knowing that somewhere out there are millions of metal worshippers that consider “Satanic Sega Genesis”, “Infected Scrotum”, “Fecal Christ”, “Evil Brain Food” or “Viscid Viscera” apt names for a band that will output all their feelings of rage and despair.

And someday, maybe, you will wonder if a band ever wanted to name their band “Corpse”, and you will find 8 entries for “Corpse” and many variations:

“Corpse Carving”, “Corpse Collector”, “Corpse Corps”, “Corpse Cum”, “Corpse Decay”, “Corpse Disposal Unit”, “Corpse Feast”, “Corpse Flesh”, “Corpse For Boiler”, “Corpse God”, “Corpse Grinder” (x4), “Corpse Grinding Machine”, “Corpse Hunter”, “Corpse Molestation”, “Corpse Molesting Pervert”, “Corpse Of Christ” (x2) , “Corpse Remains” and “Corpse Vomit”.

And rest assured, you will be happy you bought this book.

t.

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The Tit-for-tat:

Buy

A Blaze In The North American Sky

How To Perform A Tracheotomy

Enciclopedia Metallium

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Jul 13 2008
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Random Intoxicants, Tóxico Reviews

IT´S MAD MAD MAD WORLD.

“SAUL BASS (1920-1996) was not only one of the great graphic designers of the mid-20th century but the undisputed master of film title design thanks to his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Martin Scorsese.

When the reels of film for Otto Preminger’s controversial new drugs movie, The Man with the Golden Arm, arrived at US movie theatres in 1955, a note was stuck on the cans – “Projectionists – pull curtain before titles”.

Until then, the lists of cast and crew members which passed for movie titles were so dull that projectionists only pulled back the curtains to reveal the screen once they’d finished. But Preminger wanted his audience to see The Man with the Golden Arm’s titles as an integral part of the film.

The movie’s theme was the struggle of its hero – a jazz musician played by Frank Sinatra – to overcome his heroin addiction. Designed by the graphic designer Saul Bass the titles featured an animated black paper-cut-out of a heroin addict’s arm. Knowing that the arm was a powerful image of addiction, Bass had chosen it – rather than Frank Sinatra’s famous face – as the symbol of both the movie’s titles and its promotional poster.

That cut-out arm caused a sensation and Saul Bass reinvented the movie title as an art form. By the end of his life, he had created over 50 title sequences for Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, John Frankenheimer and Martin Scorsese. Although he later claimed that he found the Man with the Golden Arm sequence “a little disappointing now, because it was so imitated”.

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Jul 11 2008
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Tóxico People, Tóxico Reviews, Tóxico Texts, Work from Mexico

LOST & FOUND. OR, LA OFICINA DE OBJETOS PERDIDOS

Photos from “Oficina de objetos perdidos“, series by Ramiro Chaves. The series was done in the lost and found office of a Mexico City Metro station.

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wouldn’t it be nice if there were a place in the city where all that is suddenly gone from our lives could actually go to, end up there. and i am not only referring to the plastic surgery book one usually reads on the morning subway to work (tantalizing literature to flip through as the train screeches to a halt and then jumps again, as the skin of the face constantly lunges backwards and forwards); not only a ball that bounced away (is it maybe the one dylan thomas lost as a kid?); not only a tv set (how the hell does one lose a tv set?) but also the place where to find alongside the lost umbrella those sticky red pieces of lost guts or lost heart; lost lungs, lost thoughts, lost love, lost friends, lost moments, lost time. forgotten or mislaid or wasted or runaway or simply absent or taken or strayed; gone missing once, but somewhere expecting to be reclaimed again. still there.

and i also wonder if i one day saw some of my lost opportunities (for example) waiting patiently covered in dust upon a shelf in a dusty office: would i recognize them as mine? or do things sometimes become so lost that there comes a moment that we don´t even realize anymore they once were ours? (maybe we should mark everything we own with our initials from now on—our guts, our thoughts, our sleep, our hearts. our friends with tattoos so it won´t wash off.)

mmm.
yes. wouldn’t that be nice if there existed such an office.

because then, instead of downing a couple of blue or pink pills with the third tequila (straight) we could just go and pick up our lost sleep or our lost hope with the old man in the gray jacket. who would verify the initials against some official document or other of ours, makes us sign a few paper, hand it over. and that would be that. un-lost. or home.

but. impossible i guess. one must be a realist, in spanish at least. oficina de objetos perdidos: perdidos: lost. no found (to be found) anywhere, not in mexico, not en español. lost in a missing word of our language all the things we lost of ourselves.

g

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(Ramiro took the Martin Parr Master-Class and Christoffer Boe Workshop.)

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