I'm closing comments on the stevesgallery.com website, for various reasons - the main one being that every post is now reblogged on stevenmansour.com, and I don't see the need to manage two commenting instances for each post.
If you have a comment, please leave it there. Ideally, I'd recommend replacing the syndication feed for stevesgallery.com with the new one at stevenmansour.com.
See you there! 
Ugh - that wasn't very good, now was it?
I was disappointed by what Sony's done to Bond. The action and stunt scenes in the movie were great, especially the chase scene through the African factory. But the writers did a horrible job of making Bond seem like the charismatic superspy he's supposed to be.
The plot was almost non-existent, and while the acting was alright, there were too many gaps in the story for it to remain interesting... not to mention lots of unnecessary, brutal senseless violence that a 'real' Bond would stay away from.
It's not Daniel Craig's fault either - he could definitely pull off the character, if he were given a character. But a real James Bond wouldn't just shrug off the fact that an innocent person was tortured and killed because of his ineptitude. Actually, that wouldn't even happen in a Bond movie.
She got out of bed, her caramel skin glistening and her long, black hair still tied in a perfect ponytail. Without saying a word, I watched her naked body walk over to her suitcase, pick out some clothes, then head to the bathroom to take a shower - the second one she'd taken in as many hours.
She looked like Pocahontas oughta look like. Not the real Pocahontas, but Disney's Pocahontas. In my mind's eye, Disney's is more real anyway.
I stayed in bed and picked up the TV remote control, something that's very counterintuitive for me since I don't have a TV at home. But here, in this artificial mega-hotel built for pasty white gringos and their bank-teller wives and their three obese, lobsteresque children, I now had nothing else to do but lay in bed and watch mexican soap operas with english subtitles. In an ugly room of an ugly hotel in an ugly city, a stunning apparition of a woman is getting dressed to hit the local club scene with some girls she'd met here the night before - and without the man she just crawled out of bed from.
Her knees still wobbly, she quietly grabbed one of the two hotel keycards off the nightstand and walked out the door, never picking her eyes up off the floor. I had no desire or intention of going after her, arguing, or even so much as getting out of bed.
Twenty minutes later, I was sitting at a beachside bar along the strip, staring at something I loathe: the bottom of an empty glass. I was waiting on a 3rd round of 80-pesos-a-glass Jack Daniel's on the rocks. In the defense of "The Pirate's Loot Bar and Grill", the glasses were more akin to beer mugs and nearly filled to the rim. I wasn't sad or depressed, but I did know that I wanted to leave this place. Acapulco, like every other artificial cocoon built to attract tourist dollars, is sterile and hollow. And not "clean" sterile either, but the kind of sterile you can smell in the air of a mortician's office. Or a taxidermist's. Or a mortician-slash-taxidermist's.
Despite these hiccups, coming to Mexico definitely wasn't a mistake. I've had some of the best food I've ever tasted in my life here, in the little stands and markets that dot the otherwise uninviting cityscapes of Mexico City and Queretaro. And minus the crowds, buildings, cars, highways, pollution and garbage, it's definitely a beautiful place to explore. Mmmm... the food.
My mouth started to feel like I imagine the inside of a working microwave feels like as I started devouring my third taco. I must've been quite a sight to behold with little beads of sweat running down my forehead, my eyes sinking deep into their sockets, my hands trembling, and my normally inaudible breathing sounding closer to a fat Texan halfway through an all-you-can buffet. It was such delicious torture. There were maybe 8 or 9 clay pots sitting on the counter, each one filled with different erotic exotic meats, vegetables and combinations - each tastier (and spicier) than the last. I didn't even bother to check the price list as we sat down to eat. By the time we'd both had our of several helpings of soft tacos, quesadillas and sopes, and God knows how many refrescos to wash it all down, I paid the delightful, cheerful lady at the counter. I owed her 55 pesos, or about $5. For both of us. I've paid 20 times that in Paris for foie gras that didn't come close to being as satisfying as these little pieces of soft bread filled with love.
I can't say I've had any bad food here. Nearly every meal left me incredulous. But one night, late, we were both rather hungry and so she suggested that we go to the nearest family restaurant, one of these generic restaurant chains like "Scores" or "St-Hubert" in Canada, or, umm... well whatever you Americans pass off as a restaurant chain. 
The food was alright - nothing like the authentic home-made mexican food I'd been enjoying the the courtyards, plazas and markets since I'd gotten here, but it was serviceable and I couldn't complain. As I walked out, I began noticing something underneath all of the restaurants signs, advertisements and promotional material; a little white star with some writing underneath. A Wal-Mart logo.
As the days went on, I started seeing this logo more and more often. On other restaurants. Tourist shops. Convenience stores. Even seemingly innocuous cafes and ice cream shops.
“What Wal-Mart did in Mexico was very instructive. Mexico was a testing ground for the method of operation. They basically acquired existing stores. They moved into Mexico and that became the theme in other countries like the UK, Germany, and Japan. They would buy into an existing operation, rather then start from scratch.”
Wal-Mart, it turned out, owns a largish chunk of anything worth owning in Mexico. There are nearly 900 Wal-Mart units in Mexico, including 113 supercenters, throughout 130 cities. Wal-Mart de Mexico operates over 280 restaurants including VIPS (international cuisine), El Portón (Mexican), Ragazzi (Italian-style) and other specialized restaurants. In 2004, Wal-Mart de Mexico reported sales of $139.8 billion pesos (US $12.5 billion), a 15.8% increase over the previous year. Wal-Mart employs over 130,000 Mexicans as dronemonkeys "associates", making it Mexico's #1 employer. As in the U.S., the bottom line is king in Wal-Mart Mexico - that means no unions or other troublemakers are tolerated. These non-union Mexican Wal-Mart "associates" earn about 13 pesos an hour (about $1.20 USD) as compared to their non-union U.S. counterparts' $9.50.
"I really don't see what is to prevent us from owning all of Mexico and running it to suit ourselves."
- William Randolph Hearst
Despite the jobs created, Mexico is a country with a severe poverty problem. Social mobility is at an all-time low, while homelessness is skyrocketing. All the while, Mexicans are losing Mexico. Instead of being the owners of their own country and land, the economic fate of their country is decided in backroom deals across the border. Through trade annexation agreements such as NAFTA, outsourcing and consolidations, the powers-that-were slowly sold out their nation to the highest bidder.
And the highest bidder is always the United States.
Added to the penetration of Wal-Mart in Mexican life is the new Wal-Mart store that will appear less than one mile from the ancient pyramids of Teotihuacan. "What might this mean? Perhaps they can build a strip club at the Holy Sepulcher, a McDonald's at the ruins of Montealban, or a Hard Rock Cafe next to the Pyramids of Egypt," wrote columnist Javier Aranda, referring, respectively, to the site where Jesus was buried, another famous Mexican ruin and a man-made wonder of the world.
There is nothing "free" about free markets when they are connected via puppet strings to a stick in another country. And things aren't about to change. This year, Wal Mart will invest $750 million, more than all its competitors combined, opening 70 new stores, according to Walmex spokesman Raul Arguelles. "Expect many, many more square meters of Wal-Mart sales floor in Mexico in the future," he says.
Sincreticism unlocks the door to much of the Mexican mystery. When the Europeans came, they pulled down the Aztec temples--Teotihuacan is a fortuitous exception--and built their cathedrals from the rubble. The Teotihuacan Wal-Mart, albeit transiently imposed, sits atop land once occupied by an Aztec "tianguis" or bazaar. In Mexico, you always need to look underneath.
Mexico is a four millennium-old civilization with a culture as obdurate as granite and obsidian. In contrast, the United States is a make-believe country with a bubble-wrapped culture and a minimal national history. The smart money says that when all the Wal-Marts crumble into dust, the majestic Pyramids of Teotihuacan will still be standing.
BIG (67 MB) original file if you have a slow connection or don't care about video quality, get the smaller / dial-up version, or see it on YouTube (mediocre) or Blip.Tv (good).This is a small clip from the San Miguelada - the running of the bulls in Mexico. September 23rd, 2006. You can also look at the pics.
UPDATE: An eerie self-biography of Kimveer Gill, found in the Google Cache.
UPDATE #2: I've created a Podcast to accompany this post.
Today is September 14th, 2006.
Today, taking the subway from my home to downtown Montreal, everyone was reading their "Metro" newspaperoid and sitting silently in the train car. People eyed each other suspiciously - more than usual - and it seemed that everyone was a little on edge. I'm naturally the kind of person who looks around alot, directly at people, constantly examining my surrounding environment. Whether it's natural curiosity or ADHD I don't really know, but today everyone I looked at seemed to avert their eyes quicker, as if they felt I was staring them down, accusing them.
Maybe I was.
What happened yesterday at Dawson - and what will continue to happen in the media until the next big story comes along - is, to me, a bleak reminder that the world is broken. Though I'd love to attribute why "this happened here" to our new conservative ungovernment, they haven't been in power long enough to take the blame, unfortunately. Well, at least they can take credit for the 30+ Canadians dead in Afghanistan so far, sent there with inadequate training and equipment to fight what is basically a ghost army. Only the US and the UK have lost more troops than us. By population, though, more Canadians have died.
In a few days, though, we'll all go back to fawning over the new iPods (from Steve Jobs, who hoards his riches like a next-generation Rockerfeller), buying our cigarettes and gas from industries that help keep the American military-industrial complex in power, and wait for the next episode of 24 from Fox [News], feeding imperialism's thirst for propaganda a little more every time we watch.
Kimveer Gill - the 25 year old who shot all those people yesterday - wasn't born any different than you or me. If you go back far enough, you'll see that the same blood that flows flowed through his veins also streams through ours. The world he was immersed in was no different than ours until he got lost in a gothic vampire fantasy-land. But what led to that transition? Why did he feel a need to be different?
This morning on the metro, I could've been in any big city with a subway system... but I didn't feel like I was in Montreal. I felt like I was on the tube in London, one of the cleanest, most sterile, and dreariest places I've ever been in my life. Everyone has their little headphones plugged into their ears, with their shit-on-a-page of the day in their hands, completely disconnected from the world around them. Their experience of "being on the subway" consisted of "being anywhere but" - I think that someone could dropped dead on that train without anyone noticing. Maybe that feeling was exarcebated by the fact that I had just returned from a two-month stint in Cuba - one of the last bastions of humanism I've found - but it made me want to just break down in the middle of the train and start yelling "What the hell is wrong with you people?!?"
Instead, I kept listening to my iPod and reading my morning paper.
Mr. Gill didn't always want to kill 'innocent' people, or be - ahem - a 'vampire'. He thought that he could find uniqueness within that subculture. So there he was, "Kimveer The Vampire" (ahem) driving to Dawson College in his black Pontiac Sunfire (ahem) with a rifle in his trunk. In a sea of billboards, magazines, television, 'fashion' and pseudo-culture, he somehow decided that his identity wasn't unique enough, that he wasn't "different" enough. Well, "being the same" is "the new different".
We are seeing an entire generation - mine, and the next - weaned on spoon-fed, carefully crafted messages and ideas created to shove us into this or that path. Everything we're feeling today, all of our emotions, our great ideas, and our fears have been thought, felt and experienced thousands of time of thousands of people before us. All those people in the subway this morning shared the same distress and anxiety together, which has been felt for eons. We're simultaneously allowing the powers that be cover up our true inherent individuality with media messages, fashion, capitalism and "culture" while we're cheating ourselves out of the unity and sharing that was supposed to be our nature. While they create a feudal hierarchy and give us false senses of identity through the things they make us think we want, we're losing the ability to think for ourselves, to discern what we need to do to build the world we wanted to when we were newborns and infants. It's a lose-lose situation.
We are not united, but we are not unique either. Artificially created ideas of how to live our lives has made good little servants of us.
It's perfectly normal and acceptable that some of us get lost along the wayside. What's most troublesome to me is when we take others along with us who weren't necessarily ready to go.
Cool song, cool unofficial music video:
To everyone who says that Castro was photoshopped... sigh...
Three-quarters of Americans can correctly identify two of Snow White's
seven dwarfs while only a quarter can name two Supreme Court justices,
according to a poll on pop culture.
The poll by Zogby International has been commissioned by the makers of a new game show on pop culture called Gold Rush.
It shows that 57 per cent of Americans can identify JK Rowling's
fictional boy wizard as Harry Potter, while only 50 per cent can name
the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
Just over 60 per cent of respondents are able to name Bart as Homer's son on the television show The Simpsons, while only 20.5 per cent were able to name one of the ancient Greek poet Homer's epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Asked what planet Superman was from, 60 per cent named the fictional
planet Krypton, while only 37 per cent knew that Mercury was the planet
closest to the sun.
Respondents are far more familiar with the Three Stooges - Larry, Curly
and Moe - than the three branches of the US Government - judicial,
executive and legislative.
Seventy-four per cent identified the former, while 42 per cent identified the latter.
Twice as many people (23 per cent) were able to identify the most recent winner of the television talent show American Idol, Taylor Hicks, as were able to name the Supreme Court Justice confirmed in January 2006, Samuel Alito (11 per cent).
The pollsters spoke to 1,213 people across the United States.
The results had a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.
Dwarfs better-known than US justices: poll. 15/08/2006. ABC News Online
This is the Democracy that Bush is selling to the Middle East and Latin America?
