Posted by paulrivas on:
For your next party, why not hire real arborists that you can touch? Seriously, though, why not? Give ‘em a call.
Remember to say you saw it on VochoVision, where this guy takes pictures from inside a Vocho.
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Posted by paulrivas on:
On the big schlep, we took a city bus to Pablo Escobar's gravesite at a cemetery on the edge of Medellín. It was just another horizontal stone flat on the grass, like a business card on a green bulletin board, and it could have belonged to anybody's grandpa.
Pablo's Hippos tells the story of Escobar Gaviria and his cartel from the point of view of the 30 hippos living it up on the ruins of the free private zoo at his Hacienda Nápoles today. He sold 11,000 kilos of cocaine in 1983 and 70,000 kilos in 1993, but in 1985 Medellín was the murder capital of the world. He was the seventh-richest man on Earth, was the first to offer casino-like insurance on cocaine shipments and had three candidates killed in one election. He was also a congressman and built his own jail, from which he later escaped.
In addition to documentary footage of bad dudes having good clean fun at the Hacienda Nápoles, Pablo's Hippos features an animated storytelling hippo and new interviews with Escobar's photographer El Chino and the two or three ex-badasses from those days who weren't killed.
There's also the wacky story of the hippos themselves, who multiplied from 2 to 18 to 40. The locals call the macho of the herd Pablo and say that hippo meat is delicious, like steak. The Colombian government can't find anybody to come get 30 hippos, but can't afford to send them away, either. They tried shooting them but only wasted one before caving to protesters. If only I'd known about the hippos on the schlep!
Oh, and Medellín was plenty safe when we went in 2007. There's 100 cartels pushing 750,000 kilos this year, but it's totally safe.
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Posted by paulrivas on:
"How can I live here and not be an asshole?" the gringo named Dean asked himself. "It's not easy to do."
Land, the documentary by Julian T. Pinder, explores recent attempts by gringos to develop the Nicaraguan coastline by buying up plots of dubious ownership and building high-rise resort condos where once there was forest, agriculture and baseball fields. The bitch of it is that the only locals who are down with this are the officials taking the bribes to make it all happen. The film shows the attitudes of folks on all sides of this land grab, the most resonant of which come from the beer-drunk Dean, who's not a developer but just another white man keen to live amongst the savages.
"You know what, I don't much care for gringos, but I was born one," he laments. "What the fuck do you want me to do about it now?"
Dean calls the worst offenders in these development attempts "land whores and dirt pimps". A Nicaraguan poet's assessment that the consequence of this development is that the local people are being forced to "vivir sin vivir". And scenes from Nicaraguan beer league rodeo disasters show that this is a land governed by different rules than those by which the American invaders are accustomed to playing.
To find out what happens, go see Land Thursday 2/3 at 4pm at the Metro 4 or Friday 2/4 at 7pm at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, or go to Nicaragua.
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Paul Rivas never wears hats.
