mizarchivist

[mizarchivist]

From Anthony Bourdain:

Americans love Mexican food. We consume nachos, tacos, burritos, tortas, enchiladas, tamales and anything resembling Mexican in enormous quantities. We love Mexican beverages, happily knocking back huge amounts of tequila, mezcal, and Mexican beer every year. We love Mexican people—we sure employ a lot of them.

Despite our ridiculously hypocritical attitudes towards immigration, we demand that Mexicans cook a large percentage of the food we eat, grow the ingredients we need to make that food, clean our houses, mow our lawns, wash our dishes, and look after our children.

As any chef will tell you, our entire service economy—the restaurant business as we know it—in most American cities, would collapse overnight without Mexican workers. Some, of course, like to claim that Mexicans are “stealing American jobs.”

But in two decades as a chef and employer, I never had ONE American kid walk in my door and apply for a dishwashing job, a porter’s position—or even a job as a prep cook. Mexicans do much of the work in this country that Americans, probably, simply won’t do.

We love Mexican drugs. Maybe not you personally, but “we”, as a nation, certainly consume titanic amounts of them—and go to extraordinary lengths and expense to acquire them. We love Mexican music, Mexican beaches, Mexican architecture, interior design, Mexican films.

So, why don’t we love Mexico?

We throw up our hands and shrug at what happens and what is happening just across the border. Maybe we are embarrassed. Mexico, after all, has always been there for us, to service our darkest needs and desires.

Whether it’s dress up like fools and get passed-out drunk and sunburned on spring break in Cancun, throw pesos at strippers in Tijuana, or get toasted on Mexican drugs, we are seldom on our best behavior in Mexico. They have seen many of us at our worst. They know our darkest desires.

In the service of our appetites, we spend billions and billions of dollars each year on Mexican drugs—while at the same time spending billions and billions more trying to prevent those drugs from reaching us.

The effect on our society is everywhere to be seen. Whether it’s kids nodding off and overdosing in small town Vermont, gang violence in L.A., burned out neighborhoods in Detroit—it’s there to see.

What we don’t see, however, haven’t really noticed, and don’t seem to much care about, is the 80,000 dead in Mexico, just in the past few years—mostly innocent victims. Eighty thousand families who’ve been touched directly by the so-called “War On Drugs”.

Mexico. Our brother from another mother. A country, with whom, like it or not, we are inexorably, deeply involved, in a close but often uncomfortable embrace.

Look at it. It’s beautiful. It has some of the most ravishingly beautiful beaches on earth. Mountains, desert, jungle. Beautiful colonial architecture, a tragic, elegant, violent, ludicrous, heroic, lamentable, heartbreaking history. Mexican wine country rivals Tuscany for gorgeousness.

It's archeological sites—the remnants of great empires, unrivaled anywhere. And as much as we think we know and love it, we have barely scratched the surface of what Mexican food really is. It is NOT melted cheese over tortilla chips. It is not simple, or easy. It is not simply “bro food” at halftime.

It is in fact, old—older even than the great cuisines of Europe, and often deeply complex, refined, subtle, and sophisticated. A true mole sauce, for instance, can take DAYS to make, a balance of freshly (always fresh) ingredients painstakingly prepared by hand. It could be, should be, one of the most exciting cuisines on the planet, if we paid attention.

The old school cooks of Oaxaca make some of the more difficult and nuanced sauces in gastronomy. And some of the new generation—many of whom have trained in the kitchens of America and Europe—have returned home to take Mexican food to new and thrilling heights.

It’s a country I feel particularly attached to and grateful for. In nearly 30 years of cooking professionally, just about every time I walked into a new kitchen, it was a Mexican guy who looked after me, had my back, showed me what was what, and was there—and on the case—when the cooks like me, with backgrounds like mine, ran away to go skiing or surfing or simply flaked. I have been fortunate to track where some of those cooks come from, to go back home with them.

To small towns populated mostly by women—where in the evening, families gather at the town’s phone kiosk, waiting for calls from their husbands, sons and brothers who have left to work in our kitchens in the cities of the North.

I have been fortunate enough to see where that affinity for cooking comes from, to experience moms and grandmothers preparing many delicious things, with pride and real love, passing that food made by hand from their hands to mine.

In years of making television in Mexico, it’s one of the places we, as a crew, are happiest when the day’s work is over. We’ll gather around a street stall and order soft tacos with fresh, bright, delicious salsas, drink cold Mexican beer, sip smoky mezcals, and listen with moist eyes to sentimental songs from street musicians. We will look around and remark, for the hundredth time, what an extraordinary place this is.

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[mizarchivist]

Life-32 x 24in- 81x61cm-2023

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once again i love how star wars takes place in a massive galaxy with thousands of planets and billions of people, and yet every bounty hunter knows each other personally

[mizarchivist]

Okay, so Google Removed Pride Month and Other Diversity Holidays From Its Calendar App. There are many ways to respond to this, including leaving Google Calendar. If you can't do that for any reason, this project has something that might help.

Every year we make a calendar of dates that have particular significance to queer history. It has always been a pleasure project and hasn't made us much money, so when we made a Google Calendar plug-in, we made it pay-what-you-can. I'm grateful we did because it means anyone can access this now.

To be clear, this is more than Pride Month; this has near-daily reminders of queer history. Birthdates of people you may not recognize (though we encourage you to learn more about them on our website). This doesn't address everything. Google also removed Black History Month, Indigenous People Month, Jewish American Heritage Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Hispanic Heritage Month. We have many of them on our calendar, but we can't promise we have everything Google got rid of, as this was made with no clue that Google would do this.

Regardless, we wanted to put this resource out there in response to the news. Preserving queer history is a community responsibility, and we are grateful to share any tools that we have.

[mizarchivist]

A family of cheetahs sleep with the forest guard every night. When the Forest Dept. heard about it, they decided to check the veracity of the claim by installing a CCTV camera. This is what the camera recorded! Just amazing.

Kitties will be kitties 🐈‍⬛

[mizarchivist]

A pig photobombs a rural wedding, location unknown, but somewhere in England, 1927.

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[mizarchivist]

There is a post going around lamenting that it was so much faster to get around by train in the 1880s than it is now. And isn't it a shame we don't have that anymore?

But the thing is, the reason there were so many rail lines in the 19th century was because there had been a huge bubble on railroad building. Way too many of them got built because there was cheap funding and people wanted to cash in on the new technological craze.

But as the 19th and 20th centuries wore on, the railroads consolidated, letting the smaller and less profitable lines die because they couldn't make enough money to pay for upkeep. And they never could.

And the profits of rail came from hauling coal, not people. So yeah, the death of coal after WWII was one of the major reasons why Amtrak and Conrail were formed in the 70s. Because passenger rail was so unprofitable and always had been, but coal had made up the difference and kept rail companies afloat. But once that stopped being the case, the railroads, one by one, filed for bankruptcy. The US government stepped in and helped split passenger rail from freight rail, allowing the more profitable freight traffic to continue. And Amtrak was born to handle the remaining passenger service.

And you have the new and exciting technology of the car, and why keep up with old infrastructure when you can just build new, different infrastructure? And it gets all the government subsidy money.

So there wasn't some golden age of rail travel. It was never a sustainable system and the overextension of the railroad bubble helped pave the way for huge railroad empires to arise that monopolized transportation and ushered in the gilded age.

And we've seen these bubbles ourselves in our own time. It's not unlike the rise of huge technology companies that were convenient and fast and cheap while the money was pouring in. But then the monopolies and the enshittification set in and the only reason we have passenger rail is because of the weird half-government half-enterprise chimera of Amtrak.

We, of course, should pour more tax money into Amtrak because there literally is no other way to expand rail travel in the US. There never was a way to make passenger rail self-sustaining, especially with the cost of infrastructure repair.

But we shouldn't lionize the past, especially a past littered with the corpses of extreme booms and busts, as any kind of better era than now. Or that it would be possible to go back to that era because what formed it is the most naked form of capitalism.

[mizarchivist]

Do not punish the behaviour you want to see

I mean, it seems pretty obvious when you put it like that, right?

But how many families, when an introvert sibling or child makes an effort to socialize,  snarkily say, “So, you’ve decided to join us”?

Or when someone does something they’ve had trouble doing, say, “Why can’t you do that all the time?” (Happened to me, too often.)

Or any sentence containing the word “finally”. 

If someone makes a step, a small step, in a direction you want to encourage, encourage it. Don’t complain about how it’s not enough. Don’t bring up previous stuff. Encourage it.

Because I swear to fucking god there is nothing more soul-killing, more motivation-crushing, than struggling to succeed and finding out that success and failure are both punished.

[mizarchivist]

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, there will be a tree outside your bedroom window. It is very important to romanticize this tree as much as possible.

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laura’s endless list of favourites ● movies ➼ lord of the rings: the fellowship of the ring "I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened." "So do all who live to see such times but that is not for them to decide. All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you."

[mizarchivist]

Still Can...