a.c. rodríguez

There's a scene in the many-times-over spun-off and remade "Yo Soy Betty, La Fea," that Guinness-record-holding Colombian telenovela written by Fernando Gaitán which aired from 1999-2001, that seems so out of place it can make you wonder whether the entire 150-hour-long saga is more an allegory for something large-scale rather than an oftentimes-goofy melodrama about a nerdy unattractive secretary playing cat-and-mouse with her narcissist boss at the offices of a fashion house.  The scene is found in what's originally the 168th episode, a twenty-two-minute run where now-streamable episodes have been edited together to be between 45 minutes to an hour. The episode aired on the 16th of June 2000, and the edited version you can watch is the 68th episode entitled "Entre Cuadros de Picasso." The character Catalina Ángel (played by Celmida Luzardo), a publicist and friend to many of the series' characters, is explaining a replica of a Picasso to a group of s...

I'm getting to the post I said I'd do. It's about "Yo Soy Betty, La Fea."  I leave this excerpt from "Une Saison en Enfer" or "A Season in Hell" by Arthur Rimbaud:  "Délire II: Alchimie du verbe"  trans. by me. À moi.  L'histoire d'une de mes folies.  Depuis longtemps, je me vantais de posséder tous les paysages possibles, et trouvais dérisoires les célébrités de la peinture et de la poésie modernes. J'aimais les peintures idiotes, dessus de porte, décors, toiles de saltimbanques, enseignes, enluminures populaires ; la littérature démodée, latin d'église, livres, érotiques sans orthographe, romans de nos aïeules, contes de fées, petits livres de l'enfance, opéras vieux, refrains niais, rythmes naïfs. Je rêvais croisades, voyages de découvertes dont on n'a pas de relations, républiques sans histoires, guerres de religion étouffées, révolutions de mœurs, déplacement de races et de continents ; je croyais à tous l...

From " Monster (Kaibutsu 怪物)" dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda This is not the post I've been planning on for some time, but, I'd like to post it and save the other for next week or the following. My Storygraph Giveaway ends on the 19th and with certain politics here in USA I do have a review about an artwork that speaks more closely to my own home and my art (current and as-yet-unreleased) than this one. Surprisingly, it's not the humiliating-to-Latin-Americans 2024's "Emilia Pérez:" I don't want to talk about that egregore, even to criticize, though it's tempting; I don't want to feed it. No, I've been planning a review of an old kitschy Colombian artwork, nothing to do with narcos and exploitable violence, in a funny format that's made a come-back. But, I do want to make this post about "Monster (Kaibutsu 怪物)" now. This is also an important topic. Introduction   It's award-season and MUBI offered me three months of subscr...

"Saint Sebastian" by Takato Yamamoto Today is the feast day of St. Sebastian, martyr. It's also inauguration day in DC. It's also the first day of my StoryGraph giveaway. Martin Luther King, too, look at that. With all this, I want to tell you about the definition of "martyr." " The use of the word μάρτυς (mártys) in non-biblical Greek was primarily in a legal context. It was used for a person who speaks from personal observation. The martyr, when used in a non-legal context, may also signify a proclamation that the speaker believes to be truthful. The term was used by Aristotle for observations, but also for ethical judgments and expressions of moral conviction that can not be empirically observed. There are several examples where Plato uses the term to signify 'witness to truth,' including in Laws." Thanks, Wikipedia. So, this is the basis for the term used in Christianity.  Did you know that St. Sebastian's arrows did not kill him? ...

Title from the 1896 painting "Truth Coming Out from Her Well Armed with a Whip to Chastise Humanity (La Vérité sortant du puits armée de son martinet pour châtier l'humanité)" by Jean-León Gérôme. She left the web, she left the loom  She made three paces thro' the room  She saw the water-flower bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look'd down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack'd from side to side; 'The curse is come upon me,'  cried The Lady of Shalott. -- Lord Alfred Tennyson, 1832 Summary Set in Montréal, Pascal Plante's 2023/24 "Red Rooms" -- which is a frightening enough title if you know about the dark web -- the film begins with an enigmatic character Kelly-Anne, a woman in her mid to late twenties, attending the trial of a serial murderer and rapist, Ludovic Chevalier, while seemingly having no personal involvement in the case. Chevalier is accused of a variety of heinous crimes surrounding his...