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One early film we'll be discussing is the Spanish language version of "Dracula." Hollywood Director, George Melford filmed two versions:  an English language version during the day and a Spanish language version at night (graveyard shift--no pun intended).  Lupita Tovar, Mexican American actress of the 1930s whose starring role in "Santa" made her famous on both sides of the border, played the Mina character in the Spanish version. In this film, her name is Eva and unlike the Mina from the English-language version, Eva is much more expressive and dominant and this is interesting considering the era.  Don't be misled by the picture above.  The character of Eva negotiates power in this film differently from the English version.  

The shots are also slower and deepen the tension. In an interview, Lupita Tovar discusses how at 7p.m., they would begin shooting and leave at 7a.m. the next day.  Bela Lugosi would arrive on the set much after Lupita had gone home.  She never was able to meet him.  Many critics have noted that this Spanish language version is a much better film than the one with Lugosi playing Dracula.  

"Santa," "Dracula," "Salt of the Earth" and on to films like "Real Women Have Curves"--we're just going to have lots of fun including the chance to learn to write a screenplay.  More on this soon--as we escape the cold to enter the world of film!

My world is now one of snow and cold but in this world--as I was shoveling snow in our front yard a few days ago, I found a soft pastel blush catching my attention.  No not a fresh and lovely rose bloom--but color nonetheless.  It had stamina.  Yes, the one you see here!  I'm giving it credit for facing the major snowstorm, for holding on during the blizzard, for keeping to its pink hued petals at least as much as possible.  The artist Henri Matisse wrote, "There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted."  Agreed.  Perhaps in considering photography, the truly creative photographer is one who has forgotten other digital photo rose prints. And maybe there have been many photos of roses in snow, but since I'm a Los Angeleno, a Californiana--not endemic to this geographic location--a rose bloom in winter (even a faint one) is all new to me.  

  

In Mexico the lines are long to enter the cemeteries.  In Torreón, Coahuila where the majority of my family lives, people take a basket of fruta (mangos, guava, tuna, tamarindo), flowers,  pan de muertos which is a simple recipe (main ingredients: milk, butter, flour, sugar and anise seeds). Everyone goes.  Of course, lately, with the violence in Coahuila, my cousin Anita has been telling me that the crowds are not like they used to be but people still go.

One year when I was 12 or 13, Anita and I made our own versions of the pan de muertos.  We shaped them into figures from Mexican history.  I remember taking a long time shaping the body and head of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.  This is much before she became known in the U.S. (when Margaret Sayers Peden translated Octavio Paz's 1988 book on Sor Juana or later, when Alicia Gaspar de Alba's wonderful Second Dream was published). I had grown up with Sor Juana.  Instead of reading me fairytales, my mother's version of a bedtime story was reciting (from memory) Sor Juana Inés poems.  Imagine my little seven-year-old mind listening to "Hombres Necios" (translation:  "Foolish Men")!  On that day, I remember Anita busily shaping the flour into Ricardo Rodríguez, brother to Pedro who became the famous racing driver. She would end up marrying a racing driver (hardly famous) who had a day job and who died of a heart attack not many years after they married.  

Today Anita remains a widow and its been a while since I've visited the familia in Torreón.  Many aunts and uncles, cousins and comadres have died and today is the day to remember them all.  We create altares with their pictures, fill the altares with candles, food, pictures, whatever helps us remember. Many indigenous groups in Mexico have done this for 3,000 years:  Zapotec, Mixtec, Purepecha, Totonac, etc.  The ritual has survived and continues to thrive in many areas outside of Latin America.  It is a day when we can commune with those who have died.  

On my altar I include statues from other spiritual beliefs.  I have the Azteca goddess, Coatlicue on one side (goddess of life and death), and the Buddhist goddess Kuan Yin on the other.  Kuan Yin is represented as female but can change forms.  She is the goddess of compassion, of keen perception, mindfulness, knowledge.  I also include pictures of my familia, and of skeletons dancing and singing.  

A couple of years ago, I was in San Antonio and loved visiting the schools there.  Teachers and students had created various altares.  Some were altares for those killed in the Iraq War, altares for cancer victims, altares for those who have died from complications of diabetes, altares for grandmothers, for grandfathers, altares for those who died too young.  

What I love most about Day of the Dead is how people create their honoring of the dead.  It is their way to commune with their loved ones and with their communities.  And these rituals have made their way to North America.  In Lincoln, the Sheldon Art Museum has a number of activities planned.  Day of the Dead is also celebrated in various areas of Latin America.  These dancing skeletons below, for example, do not come from Mexico.  They are Peruvian Day of the Dead musicians!  

Living in Nebraska, where the change in season is marked (compared to my Los Angeles hometown), I can visually see the November earth changing, dying, transforming into Mictlan (realm of the dead):  leaves turning a fire red, falling, leaving skeletal branches, a barren landscape--but not completely gone never to return again. The dancing skeletons below remind me that life is intertwined within this scene.  Life and death are one.  

Today's New York Times magazine features novelist Margaret Drabble who, at 70, has just published a memoir, The Pattern in the Carpet:  A Personal History with Jigsaws.  Kudos to Drabble for taking the topic of games, researching its history, and weaving the metaphor of play through a history of her life and the lives around her.  I've been a Drabble fan since the 1970s when I read her novel, The Needle's Eye.  A friend had recommended it after our lively discussion on Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie.  Both novels focus on class and people's preoccupations with money (or the desire to eschew it) and the career choices or interpersonal decisions they choose when they place money or reputation based on wealth as the object of desire.  In the article, Drabble's family is described as "first-generation bourgeois, one foothold removed from working class."  Margaret and her sister were the first in her family to go to college.  This perspective is key to her work, key to creating such multi-dimensional characters whose desires lead to compromises that then lead to incomplete lives.  Her characters are like watercolors:  layers upon layers of washes that add up to truths about themselves, about our human condition.  

On another topic (that may or may not be connected but this is where my head is going):  This past week, Ellen Degeneres was hired on to replace Paula Abdul on "American Idol".  I have always been an Ellen Degeneres fan for her comic timing, her sharp wit.  This past summer when she sat in on one show of "So You Think You Can Dance," her comedic remarks interrupted the serious business of judging. Perhaps they asked Degeneres to judge due to critical comments about the show's homophobic bent but if this is true, the solution doesn't fit the problem.  I was not a fan of Degeneres sitting on the judge's panel.  The judges on "So You Think You Can Dance" are all veteran dancers and choreographers.  They speak the technical dance jargon; they know dance.  Ellen's comments during the episode focused on a dancer's cute face and eyes.  Some may think this is essential to a TV show in order to draw viewers.  I say keep it serious in order to educate viewers about dance and the craft of dance (and maybe this is why I am not in the TV business).  Simon Cowell (who creates and produces all these 'rags to riches" reality contests) often decides to comment on a singer's costume, body shape or hair cut instead of what is most important:  how the singer sang the song. It says looks trump talent (not that this is a new adage--it's older than Dreiser's Sister Carrie).  

A few weeks ago, my partner and I went to hear Bonnie Raitt and Taj Mahal in concert.  They were fabulous.  Looks had nothing to do with their breathtaking vocals.  And anyway, we could hardly see them--we were way in the back.  It didn't matter!  Bonnie Raitt once said in an interview that if she were to start her career now, it would never happen because the focus is all about looks.  She said the focus on craft and the time needed to hone your craft is not often valued.  Susan Boyle (from "Britain's Got Talent," another Cowell show) shattered Raitt's comment but just for a little while.  

All these shows:  "American idol," "So You Think You Can Dance," "Britain's Got Talent," etc. remind me of little Caroline Meeber at the beginning of Dreiser's Sister Carrie.  There is Caroline on the afternoon train with her faux alligator-skin satchel "full of the illusions of ignorance and youth" on her way to "fame and fortune" in Chicago.  I think of all the thousands of people who line up to audition every year for American Idol, etc. and often wonder--are they there because their desire is to be famous or rich or because they truly are passionate about the craft of dance, music, singing?  

In England, Margaret Drabble writes about people who have misdirected desires and carefully reveals what they do to achieve their desires, how it forms who they are (specifically those who have been raised as working class or "one foothold removed from working class").

During my senior year in high school, after feeling the pressure of so many people telling me what I should study in college to "get the job," "make a lot of money," "rise above my working class background," I approached a career counselor I trusted and still value his words today. He said not to even think about a job or career.  Instead he told me to take those classes that would make my heart sing.  "Follow your passion and use that passion to develop what you love to do."  I've tried to do that but as I have discovered, it's never easy.  Bonnie Raitt at times has swerved into the pop music realm (going for catchy simplistic tunes) to stay afloat or paid the big bucks to keep her hair that lovely red.  The pressures are intense:  a jigsaw of a puzzle at times.  At 70, Margaret Drabble is not flashy or pretty.  She's smart and wise.  Her novels have consistently returned to the theme of choice.  "Can we . . . unmake our beginnings, or are we always acting willy-nilly on the promptings of the past?  Are our individual stories foretold, or do we create them as we go along?" To answer these, Drabble has always chosen family to work out this puzzle but I have always broadened her theme to include social norms, societal expectations. Can we really disengage ourselves from desiring what society and family want us to desire or from what society and family deem an authentic life?  Can we truly seek out our own desires to arrive at an authentic truth?  

What do you think?