Cineclub · · Tucson

I Love Lucy in The Corn Chip Curse

Nosferatu Phantom of The Night. Dir. Werner Herzog. 1979


In the village where I live, we are surrounded by tortilla chips. In the many, many Mexican restaurants, the servers drop hot bowls of the golden triangles and say to you as you sit down, "Welcome ¡Estás en tu casa!"

There are row after row of Doritos in the shops. There is even an unguarded bag of tortilla chips at work today. So it is possible here to eat corn chips every day at almost every meal and in between. And I suffer from the corn chip curse—once I start eating them, I don't stop until they are all gone. Afterward I always experience guilt and indigestion. But that hot salty crunch.

Since the chips in the office kitchen are not mine, and I know I cannot eat one without eating them all—cursed curse—I hiss, I bite a knuckle, and I turn away. This is for the best. It is definitely not a good thing to eat all the corn chips. They are loaded with empty calories and if you eat all of them every day, before long you will surely die.

But there are worse things than death. What if you are a vampire who cannot not die? Then one day you see a photo of your real estate broker's wife, Lucy. She has such a beautiful neck. You know that if you cannot die perhaps your condition would be a little easier if at least you could love her and she would love you back.

That is what this movie is about. 

Links · · Provinciano

El Tesoro

Hiram Peña - El Tesoro

Photo: Hiram Peña

A shot of Sonoran nightlife with an Almodovar chaser:

Cada año la anfitriona de El Tesoro organizaba el concurso de belleza Miss Sonotl. A diferencia de los típicos concursos de belleza, los organizadores no exigían tener ciertas medidas ni un mínimo de altura, tampoco se ponían límites a la edad y se podía concursar año tras año hasta que ganaras la corona. La misma anfitriona, cuando ganó el concurso, fue coronada en medio de gritos de fraude del público borracho. 

Each year the hostess of El Tesoro organized the Miss Sonotl beauty pageant. Unlike typical beauty pageants, the organizers didn't require specific measurements or a minimum height, nor did they set age limits and one could compete year after year until possibly winning the crown. The same hostess, when she herself won the contest, was crowned amid shouts of fraud by the drunken audience.

El Tesoro — Provinciano

Honest Stuff I Make Up · · Tucson

Astral Projection

By all appearances I am just folding towels here in a busy Tucson laundromat. But also I am struggling to explain in Spanish the role of rendered horse fat in fabric softener to a room full of politely horrified women attending a clandestine Tupperware party in Cuernavaca.

Tesseract

Tesseract Illustrations from Charles Howard Hinton’s The Fourth Dimension.
The Public Domain Review