MeMag - Me Magazine

This was marked in tape on the concrete on a pier where they are building apartments. All over Oslo they are tearing down any building they can find which has some history and beauty to it, in order to make room for glass and steel monstrosities.

Everyone in this city seems obsessed with real-estate. Every street has a real-estate office and every week you get several offers in the mail to sell your home. It’s absurd. People seem to all buy apartments and sell them as a hobby. On two of my three latest café trips, I have overheard people on the next table discussing the new apartment they have bought this week. Me, I fear that I’m heading for financial ruin because I had two coffees today instead of one.

Twice a year I get new neighbors, -some slick young person in a suit move in, he has everything redecorated by eastern european underpaid workers, he sells, and another slick young person moves in. This repeats endlessly. Whenever someone asks me where I live, they always add a question of how much the apartment is currently worth. And there are more slick young men in suits standing in gangs outside the supermarket. When you pass them to get your groceries, they say “psst… you wanna sell your apartment?” If I tell people that I have no idea what this place is worth, they look shocked. “I don’t care”, I explain. “I’m not planning to sell. I like it here. Besides I don’t technically own it. My mother does”. They then usually add some suggestion about moving a wall or subletting. I try to explain that I actually need a place to live. To which they have no reply, just looks of bewilderment.

The city itself is covered in trenches and has been for decades. Since Norwegian builders never actually do anything, except to stand around and smoke hand-rolled cigarettes, every building is already out of style by the time it is finished. Some streets look like a scene from World War One. They are digging in like the grenades and mustard gas could start dropping any minute. Cranes are looming over all the emerging buildings. There seem to be a consensus that Oslo is one of the three or four biggest cosmopolitan marvels of the world and that if Sydney has an opera house, then it’s just silly if we don’t have a bigger and newer one covered in Italian marble. Surely it must be good for tourism if we eliminate anything that has a trace of history and replace it with medium-sized skyscrapers.

So here is a little epitaph for Oslo. The city by the nice fjord that you can hardly get to anymore because of the fences and building sites. Where all charming old buildings protected by law against demolition has convenient fires. Soon it will all be gone and I will move away. By then of course, this apartment will be the only piece of real-estate left to sell and I will get billions for it.

The Internet Archive, one of my favourite online resources, now has the full length movie Charade from 1963 as a free download. At the time of it’s original release, someone screwed up and forgot to add the copyright text to the credits, thus making it public domain, in accordance with the copyright laws of the time. The movie stars my all time greatest love Audrey Hepburn, as well as Cary Grant and Walter Matthau. This is an excellent romantic thriller-comedy. The music is by Henry Mancini, title designs is by Maurice Binder and the direction is by Stanley Donen. You simply need to see this movie.

The Internet Archive, for those who haven’t visited it, is a HUGE archive of copyright-free material that can be downloaded in various formats. You can find full-length features and cult series, such as Reefer Madness or Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, or you can enjoy old ’50s instructional films, such as Dating: Do’s And Don’ts, Are You Ready for Marriage? and Are You Popular?

There are also countless wonderful vintage car commercials and Populuxe films, such as Design For Dreaming, A Wonderful New World of Fords, and American Look (part 1, 2, and 3) and the ever popular A Great New Star, staring Dinah Shore and some sparkling new Chevrolets.

Charade download link found through Memap.org. Audrey Hepburn photos link through Growabrain

Thing are breaking down. This week my DVD burner started to drop subtle hints that enough was enough. Then my biggest and newest hard drive quietly passed away. My TV looks and acts like it’s about to explode and my keyboard is displaying signs of writers cramp, skipping letters here and there and sometimes refusing to convey any typing at all. Then the day before yesterday, as I was out photographing, my camera suddenly started to break apart. The ground glass separated from it’s frame and fell out all by itself. That’s not even possible. Somehow I managed to catch both parts in mid-air. All in all a wave of mechanical mass-suicide. Was it something I said?

All week I’ve had this uncomfortable feeling you get whenever a stranger looks at you and smiles. This has been happening a couple of times each day. Do I know these people? Should I smile back? Are they looking at someone else standing just behind me? And if so, what are they doing behind my back? Now it turns out that Oslo is hosting a huge gay festival this weekend and the city has been filling up with hordes of effeminate men all week. They look at me like I’m the last piece of candy in the box and they are still peckish. Finger food. The last few nights I have been walking through dark streets alone with only the spikes on my camera tripod feet to defend me, fearing that my days as an anal virgin are numbered. I live in fear. But in a way I suppose I also enjoy the attention. Which is even scarier.

What will happen next, I wonder?

This time last year I was stalking a woman who worked in a bookstore. I was in there almost every day, stuttering, mumbling, buying pens and erasers and paper I didn’t need. I kept my friends in writing materials all summer. I collected little receits that said “thank you” and had her name on them. It did upset me a little that she would give her smile to anyone, just as long as they bought something. But she was a good girl. She always smiled, allthough towards the end there seemed to be a trace of worry in her eyes. Then one day she disappeared and after a while I stopped going there. I never knew what happened to her.

Tonight as I was standing downtown, waiting for a streetcar, she walked right past me. Where was she going in such a hurry at 11:04 at night? She didn’t look at me, just walked on by. Staring straight ahead. Still smiling. I let her go.

Whenever I’m standing still with a camera in hand, I seem to take on the form of some sort of tourist attraction. People will be drawn to me. They ask questions. Often it virtually turns into an inquisition. More often than not people will involve themselves in whatever it is that they think I’m doing and imagine that they are somehow an important part of my reason for standing there. For instance… I might be on my knees photographing a wild flower when someone will approach me from behind and ask if I’m there to photograph them. What? I remember standing at a train station, cleaning the filter on my camera or something like that, when a man with a bicycle wanted to know if I was there to photograph him. I said that I wasn’t. His reply was “and how can I trust that? How can I know if you are planning to photograph me or not?” I said “Well… you just asked me and I answered”. This was not satisfactory. He seemed to be in a hurry and the fact that I was standing there holding a camera seemed to function as an invisible barrier he couldn’t get past. There was plenty of space in front of me, but he was stuck. Eventually he built up the courage and ran past me trying to cover his face with both hands and push the bicycle at the same time. Some people are like that.

The other irritating thing that will happen from time is your stereotypical security guard, hard at work in a country with fairly little crime. He has applied to the police academy and failed to get in. He has applied to be a UN peacekeeper and failed to get in. He has tried to get hired as a bouncer at some hip nightclub and failed to get in. So he is left with a security guard uniform from a shopping center, a HUGE keychain and a four-legged colleague who despises him. He attends weekly law enforcement classes in the form of a TV show called Walker, Texas Ranger. Eventually he will “accidentally” shoot himself while cleaning his gun, but until that happens, he is your problem. He will jump at any possible opportunity to push people around. And a person carrying a camera might just be such an opportunity.

Most people however, are friendly. Your typical Norwegian will only talk to strangers if he or she is part of a group of people and there is alcohol involved. On the weekends in Norway, there is always alcohol involved. Virtually anyone over fourteen is dead drunk on a friday night. We don’t have a tradition here for having an occasional glass of wine with dinner or a single cognac enjoyed in solitude in the evening. That’s just a waste of alcohol. When you drink, you need to do it properly to get the maximum effect of these expensive drops. A drink without a binge is like foreplay without sex. It’s just a wasted opportunity. So people who are walking around on a friday night in Oslo are usually drunk. And they seem absolutely fascinated when they come across someone who isn’t. Suddenly there are questions that need to be answered.

The most frequently asked questions are:

- Are you a photographer?

Not an unfair question really. Theoretically someone could be the owner of a camera without being employed as a photographer. Technically this person would then be a camera owner rather than a photographer. Or so one would think. To most Norwegians however, all sober single people carrying cameras (that aren’t built into cell-phones) are in fact photographers. They have already made up their minds when asking the question. So the question is in a way similarly stupid as someone shaking a headless corpse, asking “are you dead?” But since I don’t really see myself as a photographer, I often shock them by answering a simple smiling “no”. They always look surprised. Probably it isn’t often that a headless corpse speaks. They might continue” what are you then?” To which I may answer something like “oh… I’m just a person”. No lables on me.

- What kind of photos do you take?

I never know how to answer this so I constantly experiment with new and different answers. People need to put what I do into a little labled box. If they see me photographing a dog, they will imagine that I am a dog photographer. The idea of someone going around chaotically shooting anything seems to disturb them. After all… most people have a “thing” they do. Some project or hobby. Some obsessive interest. I don’t. I wish I had one thing that interested me so that I could dedicate my life to it. Instead I’m doomed to be slightly interested in everything (except sports), but not passionate enough to actually study anything in depth. I’ll probably never ammount to anything great. I have tried explaining this to people asking me if I am a dog-photographer, -that my lack of interest in dogs and futile search for meaningful subtext and a sense of purpose through the expression of subjective ideas through art will most likely lead to my tragic suicide at some later point in life. But they seem to prefer a simpler answer, like “I take black and white pictures”. “Ahhhh, those are niiiice. So much better than color”. “Well, why don’t you shoot black and white too then”, I think quietly.

- Take my picture!

Technically not a question, but we must remember that the word “please” doesn’t exist in the Norwegian language, at least not in a form that can easily be fit into a question. When we ask for things, we demand. An english phrase like “I think I’ll start with the Camembert appetizer, please” would in Norway be something like “I shall have cheese!!” You not so much ask for something as command. Smiling or eye contact is avoided in favor of a cold nonchalant bored look. What can I say… Linguistically it is closer to Klingon than anything else.

So… “take my picture!!” is often barked in my direction. Lately I have started to say yes to everyone simply because from the few people I said yes to last year, I got some really good photos. So far this year I have only accumulated a vast quantity of group photos of people balancing beer on their head. Which would be fine if the photos were better. Groups are difficult to do. Especially inebriated ones.

- Why are you taking my picture?

This one always surprises me. It is the follow-up question to the previous one, usually asked by the same person who asked/told me to photograph him/her in the first place. If women are involved, the question will usually come from an aggressively protective girl friend to the woman who originally asked. Typically, a bimboish pretty girl will ask me to photograph her and while she is posing away, some potentially violent amazone will suddenly appear in my viewfinder, blocking my view, demanding to know what the hell I think I’m doing. The posing girl will then try to push her bodyguard aside and they will end up arguing it out with each other while I quietly slip away.

- What will you use these for?

Question asked with a hint of worry after someone has asked me to photograph them and I have done so. Only afterwards do they stop to think that they may just have had their souls stolen by a maniac with a magic box. I find it difficult to answer this question since it was they who asked me and not vice versa. At that point I don’t have any plans to use the photos for anything in particular. I usually tell them that I don’t know and if this seems to worry them even more, I say something like “I’m just experimenting, trying to learn photography”. Sometimes I say that I’m trying to build up a portfolio in order to become rich and famous. People are fine with that. The important thing is never to mention the word “internet” (see more on the evil pornographic internet below).

- Can you please take a picture of me and my wife

A question which in it’s form indicates that the person who is asking is not local. The picture they want me to take will be shot with their own camera. I always explain that even though I do carry a camera myself, I have no idea how to operate their cameras. They don’t mind. There have been days when I have shot more photos of other people with their cameras than I have shot for myself. I wish I had a copy of all of these shots. If I’m in the mood I go to great lengths to give them a perfectly composed holiday snap. The last time I performed this service, the subject was a couple with a child who was perhaps nine or ten years old. “Not him” they said, pointing to the kid. “Just the two of us”. The kid said “I want to be in it”, but the woman pushed him away and said “not him… not so important… just us two”. So the kid sat on a bench, dangling his feet, looking deeply depressed while I shot the couple. I wanted to ask them what the hell was wrong with them, but no words came out. I also wanted to crop most of their heads out but it was a digital camera and I knew he would check it afterwards… the male… the keeper of the family camera.

- How much is it?

Question asked by tourists thinking that I shoot tourists for a living. I don’t. The price question have been asked only once by a Norwegian family who looked like they might be homeless. I suppose they were used to everything coming at a high price. Everyone else has always expected me to do them a portrait for free. I don’t mind doing that, but if I’m going to spend time and money on something I would prefer to get something out of it myself as well, such as a possible photo for some future exhibit. Surprisingly hardly anybody has ever asked me to send them a photo. They just want to be photographed. It is an event. It proves to them that they were there, -that at some point in their lives they were important enough to be photographed by a stranger.

- Are you from… (insert name of newspaper here)

The newspaper name they pick seem to always reflect what they themselves read. Conservatively dressed people will mention a conservative newspaper. And so on. Usually the question is asked with badly hidden anticipation, and there is often a follow-up question: “Will I be in the paper?” or “when will this be out?”

I always tell people that I’m not from any paper, but once they have an image in their minds of themselves as celebrities, they rarely accept this answer. Another possibility is always offered: “Are you freelance?” -”Are you going to sell these to…?” At this point I usually give in and say “yes, maybe”.

- Where are you from?

Kind of vague, this is a variation on the what newspaper are you from-question. “Where” usually refers to some sort of published media. Still, the form of the question always confuses me. “Where are you from” could be a question about my country of origin since many of these encounters take place in a local park where around 3000 tourists with cameras run around every summer. For some reason I seem to be the only one of these 3000 camera-carryers who is ever approached and asked any of this.

- Are you from… (insert name of TV station here)

This one is surprisingly common. Only yesterday did I last get this. The surprising part is that one would think that a TV station would use some sort of large video camera rather than a small beaten up SLR from the late ’70s, but apparently not. People’s questions reflect their own hopes or fears of fame.

- Are you working on a book?

A rare variation on the TV and newspaper questions, asked by people who read books. Apparently books are similar to TVs, only they don’t come with remote controls. I’m not familiar with the concept myself.

- Are you going to put these on the internet?

Often asked jokingly after I have photographed someone. The internet hasn’t really caught on here yet among the general population and it is mostly used for the aquisition of porn and the latest viruses out there. Since all Norwegian newspapers only ever mention the words “internet” and “photography” in the same sentence in pedophilia- and voyeur-cases, most Norwegians firmly believe that once they get their portrait put in an online photo gallery, millions of ugly middle-aged perverts will mastrubate off of it. Not even handsome middle-aged perverts, mind you. -Ugly ones!

Some people, mainly young women, will take this even further and ask if I am some sort of pervert. To which I always answer honestly; “yes”.

All-in-all these conversations, allthough somewhat repetitive in their nature, can be very rewarding if you are in the mood for them. Except for the ones that interrupt you to the degree that you miss an important moment. After all I love people. Just not very often.

I am aware of the fact that I’m performing a social function. Once in a while, and these are my favourite moments, someone on their first date will ask me politely… shyly to photograph them. They use this opportunity to move a little closer together. He might put his arm around her for the first time. It is a tense moment. My camera makes his move legitimate. A couple of times people have kissed and I can tell that it’s the first time. I’m witnessing an important event in someone’s life. I stand there gawking. I forget to click the shutter.

I developed the latest batch of negatives which mainly consisted of shots depicting myself in various pretentious poses. I am aware of the fact that the old phrase “the camera never lies” is in itself probably the biggest lie ever spoken about photography. “Few things lie as convincingly as a camera” would be a better phrase. And yet… it somehow seems more likely that if you look at 36 different photos depicting what is obviously an idiot, then all 36 exposures cannot be complete lies. If it looks like a dork, then I’m afraid it’s likely to be a dork. Sigh.

On a positive note, thanks to a new battery in my exposure meter, I have now gone from shooting all extremely underexposed shots to shooting all overexposed shots. Or rather… they are all perfectly exposed, and that doesn’t print or scan as nicely as slightly underexposed negatives do. Decades of measuring light and I’m still uncertain about it all.

It is similar to the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat in which a cat locked in an airtight box containing a fiendish mechanism with a 50/50 chance of releasing poisenous gas cannot be said to be either dead or alive until the box is opened. In a way it is both as long as both possibilities are present. But whereas the miaouing coming from the box and the mere fact that there is too little air inside would help to give an indication as to the health of an imprisoned feline, your rolls of film stay perfectly quiet. They retain their secrets. They mystery of their content is limited only by the your imagination.

So the trick is never to develop anything, thereby avoiding the unevitable sense of disappointment. Ignorance is after all bliss.

Yesterday afternoon it stopped raining and in the evening I went for another walk with my heavy old camera gear. Since there is absolutely nothing else to photograph I resorted to shooting pretentious self-portraits and water puddles. After three hours of this my back was so tired that I almost didn’t make it back home. I really have to get myself a packhorse or some kind of small mule. Maybe a camel will do. Or a huge but dossile body builder.

So today I spent most of the afternoon and early evening pampering myself, trying to prepare my back for another excursion. Which didn’t work out at all. I ended up standing melodramatically by the window looking out as the last daylight slowly faded away. Getting over to the window was painful enough so it was clear that I wasn’t going anywhere. Another day wasted.

Earlier today I had scored some good vanilla ice cream, and I ate so much of it that I had to take a long hot shower to stop my teeth from clattering. Then I ate everything else that wasn’t nailed down. Now both sides of me are hurting equally much, which gives a nice sense if balance. It’s back to bed again to watch more videos. Maybe tomorrow will be the day.

This excellent article by Christopher Hawkins identifies the different types of abusive clients that anyone trying to run a small business will encounter. A very good read since it helps to eliminate the feeling you sometimes get that you yourself is the one to blame when things break down.

What the article doesn’t say is how one is supposed to make a living if every single client is impossible and needs to be fired.

“Some folks really do want something for nothing, it seems, and they will use passive-aggressive tactics to try to get you to lower your bill. Some will even go so far as to refuse to pay, even though the invoice is less than the estimate. Don’t fall for it.”

More group therapy can be found in the form of stupid client quotes over at Clientcopia.

Article found through Accordion Guy

So yet another week has passed without any real effort on my part to write a blog entry. There are two reasons for this:

1. I never do anything. Most of my time is spent sitting in this room in font of this screen. There is great opportunity to write, but little chance of any content that anyone would find interesting. I suppose I could post a zillion silly eclectic links, but everyone else already does that. Life is boring I shun any opportunity to do something new and then feel intensely sorry for myself for leading a life with no new input. For instance… this morning the phone rang and someone wanted me to go on a road trip to a place where there is a cemetery for old fifties cars. Here I am constantly complaining that there is nothing more to photograph in this city and that I cannot get anywhere since I’m too neurotic to drive myself. But do I say yes? No, I just feel panicky about going somewhere I haven’t been before. How am I supposed to sit in a car for two hours? My back will probably hurt. Will there be restrooms along the way? I just don’t know so I cannot go. Even though I know I love driving in this kind of weather with the window open and the wind in my… scalp. I want to but it’s impossible. Some other friends of mine are going fishing. Just hearing them talk about that trip made me worried.

2. I never have the time. Whenever I feel I have something to write about, the phone rings or I have to answer several e-mails so that people won’t have to wait a full day for an answer, which will be annoying to them and eventually lead to haitred towards me. And since my memory is so poor I have to do things right away before I forget it, such as writing a shopping list and putting it in my jacket pocket before I forget to and then struggle not to forget what I plan to write on this liste during the time it takes to find pen and paper. At any given time I have half a dozen browser tabs open with various half-read articles. One page casually refers to the basic tastes as being sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami, which makes me wonder what the hell umami is and what’s wrong with me for not knowing. So another tab will be opened and searches made. This leads to pages about wine tasting and food culture and I start to think about wine tasters and gourmets and how they are all pretentious assholes. Superfluous people. There wouldn’t be a population problem if we just got rid of all wine tasters, lawyers and advertising executives. Does the human race benefit from having people sip and then spit out wine and then talk about it like it´s something deep and meaningful? I think not. Parachute them out over the Amazon I say, and see how long they survive without a consultant to build a fire for them. The survivor, if any will be the strongest alpha-winetaster. Selected by nature to breed a new stronger race of tree-swinging gourmets.

I get angry… I search for web pages that are hostile to wine tasters. And so on. A million half-finished digressions. It doesn’t lead to anything but wasted time. But it seems important there and then. Other things become trivial. I know there are things I should do, like cleaning the windows. It’s been four years since I last did that. I simply haven’t had the time.

I usually take one trip outside everyday to have coffee. Some days I manage to force myself to go out with my camera in the evening, which takes hours of preparations. There needs to be rewards involved for when I get back home. Ice cream maybe, or a new DVD that I won’t allow myself to watch unless I have done something to deserve it. I either fail to convince myself to go out and “work” and feel guilty and disappointed about it, which leads to eating the ice cream anyway as an anti-depressant and then feeling even more guilty. Or it leads to me actually going outside. I never have anywhere to go, so I always go to the same park. Nothing ever happens there but it is a nice location and if something once did happen, the park would be a great canvas for that. By the time I get there I’m usually exhausted from carrying the heavy camera(s) and tripod and I have to sit on a bench and rest until the sun has gone down and it is too late to do anything. I go home, furious about not having any new photos, eat the ice cream and feel guilty anyway. Even though I did the work. Every day is like this.

Today so far, I have been outside for my regular coffee. These trips have a fifty-fifty success rate. Some days I meet someone I know and sit and chat which is great, especially since it kills a couple of hours of the long boring day. Today I noticed to my horror that one of our domestic celeb comedians was standing outside my local café. This person makes a living largely from making regular people who never asked to be on tv look stupid so that he himself can appear superior. Regular people like me. I sat down and tried to achieve that cool bored look that self-confident people have. Maybe I would be safe. These people can smell fear. Any sign of insecurity and they go for the throat. People laugh and applaud. More superfluous people. So after a while he comes over and sits at the table next to mine. By now everyone else seems to have left except for some trendy teenagers in their early thirties who are probably hoping to get on tv. Nothing happens. I notice that it’s raining tiny green worms from the tree I’m sitting under and also some small white things with legs. they are all over me. Is this part of a candid camera scheme? Probably not. They are too small to be visible on camera. I guess the guy is just having coffee. I still blame him for ruining mine. Why is it virtually impossible to sit in a café without being accosted by some beggar or aggressive junkie wanting to talk to you? Or a film team. They are everywhere. Superfluous people.

I go home and spend fifteen minutes in front of the rack of bread at the supermarket, trying to decide what type of bread to buy. An impossible task. There are a dozen different types. How can I know there and then what I want to eat for the next five or six days? I can’t make that kind of commitment. In the end I give up and go home without any. There is no shopping list in my pocket for some reason. I buy lots of things that I don’t need. Two types of pancakes. More rewards for work I will never do.

These benches, shot earlier, were on a roll of film I developed along with the shots from last night. I think this may be the only shot I’m really happy with so far this year.

Went for a walk last night and brought my camera(s). These shots were all taken between 9:45 and 11:45pm at an old sports arena nearby. Surprisingly few people were about considering that this was the first evening in weeks that had some warm(ish) weather and even a hint of sun. Managed to discretely sneak into one of the frames myself.

As a teenager I used to read a lot of comic books imported from the states, as we didn’t really have pop culture in this country back then and there were only innocent comics for kids published domestically, like Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse etc…

In the imported comics, there were these masked wrestlers appearing from time to time, living everyday lives like regular people, only with their masks on, like a cross between a super hero and a normal citizen. I didn’t get it.

Only a few months ago I discovered that these characters actually exist! Curious. Not only are there hundreds, if not thousands of these masked wrestlers in Mexico, but some of these guys keep their mask on after work, shrouding their daily life in mystery. I can picture some of these bulky masked people going to the market to buy eggs and coffee in the morning… Reading the sports-pages on a park bench… Signing a few autographs for the local kids.

El Santo (”The Saint”) is probably the most famous Mexican wrestler of all time, and his life rivals any B-movie. It’s all like a badly written plot.

The prologue to the life of this living saint was a chance event that just happened to trigger a mass-movement: In the early 1930s a small troupe of US wrestlers went south of the border to compete against their Mexican counterparts. One Irish-American wrestler, fighting under the name of El Ciclón (”the Cyclone”) apparently disliked his unpopularity and had a local craftsman fashion him a leather mask to hide his identity in the ring. Perhaps the locals favored their grappling countrymen to these visiting gringos and he got fed-up with all the booing, or perhaps he just wanted to avoid being recognized in a dark alley after a match he had won over some local hero. In any case, when the people saw this masked wrestler, something clicked with their ancient Mayan culture of masks and ritual sacrifice and with the tradition of honoring their dead with dramatic costumes. Lucha Libre, the modern Mexican free style wrestling was born.

Meanwhile… another unpopular wrestler, Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta spent the first half of the ’30s trying to come up with the ultimate wrestling image for himself. He picked up on the new trend of wearing masks and tried several aliases in the ring. After years of unsuccessful attempts he hit upon the formula of wearing a silver mask and cape. It looked very flashy. But what would soon spark his improbable fame was his decition to keeping his identity permanently hidden outside the ring as well as inside it. The mask always stayed on and Santo, “El Enmascarado de Plata” (”The Man in the Silver Mask”) was born. During his years of image building, he had also become a very good wrestler and had a seemingly endless arsenal of new spectacular moves (many of which are now commonplace in pro wrestling). In 1951 he got his own weekly comic book. The next step up was the movies. His debut film was the 1958 film Cerebro del Mal (”Brain of Evil”).

Throughout his career Santo starred in around 50 hugely popular B-movies, playing… himself. These movies are unique in that the protagonist who battled monsters and aliens on-screen could also be seen live in the wrestling ring. People could follow this real living super-hero in the comic books and in magazines… everywhere. El Santo was as big in Mexico as Elvis was in the States. And he stayed in character and in every Mexican’s heart for forty years! He kept wrestling into his 60s before he retired to embark upon a new career as an escape artist. Shortly prior to his death in 1984, he shocked everyone by suddenly unmasking on a TV-show. When he died he was buried in his mask.

During Santo’s long career, other masked wrestlers cropped up everywhere. Some became almost as big as he was, such as Blue Demon, who co-starred in several Santo-pictures, Blue Panther and Mil Mascaras (”a Thousand Masks”). And of course there is El Hijo del Santo (”the Son of Santo”) and Blue Demon jr. who both continue their fathers’ legacies.

Lucha Libre is now being re-vamped north of the border for the English-speaking audience. The cartoon show ¡Mucha Lucha! ran for three successful seasons and at Club Mayan in Los Angeles the emphasis in on the comically kitchy popular culture surrounding Mexican wrestling, rather than the deeply serious sport itself. Huge events are staged where the wrestling is interwoven with comedy, burlesque strip-tease and various ’50s inspired music. Several of the most popular wrestlers from Mexico attends, such as Mil Mascaras, now in his 60s and still going strong. The name of this new retro salsa of camp is Lucha VaVoom. The next show is billed as Two Nights of Sex And Violence. Does entertainment get any better than this?

Links and sources: Check out the fantabulous VIVA LUCHA art show, listen to some lovely surf rock with Los Straitjackets (who also have their own Tetris-style online game). Get your masks here or here. Read an Introduction to Lucha Libre or read more about El Santo here, here or here. DVDs of some of the movie classics are available from Rise Above Entertainment, Santo And Friends and VCI Home Video. Sonambulo looks like a promising comic book. Haven’t read that one yet. Randy’s Bamboo Room has some examples of Los Bros Hernandez’ incredible comic artwork in the form of an EP cover. You should also read the brothers’ comics Love And Rockets (my favourite comics ever). They are published by Fantagraphics. Here are some very nice Lucha action figures.
And finally some excellent info sites with lots of useful links: From Parts Unknown, Fwak! and Viva La Lucha Libre Dot Net. Many of the above links were found through these three.