This film is great Nezua. Thanks for posting it!

K

I don't get why all the obsession with the fearfulness of Death. It's so negative. I like to look on the bright side! Maybe nanorobots will revitalize my frozen corpse.

(Great flick.)

jeje...can't tell how much is snark here, tom. don't know if you know, but mexican culture is saturated with images of the skeleton and skulls, and such. from kids toys to candies to traditions and holidays like el día de los muertos. death is not, actually, as feared a concept as it is here in the USA...which is why you will see art like this coming from Mexican artists (Castillo is Mexicano).

Nezua,

Yes, my phasor was set on Max Snark, aimed at my own culture's (and my own family's) absolute terror of death and our insistence that we can deal with it by forgetting about it or imagining it away.

Have you read Drexler's bizarre book Engines of Creation? About how we will fill our bodies with nanobots, which will basically constitute a secular Rapture in the author's lifetime. (I'm interpreting slightly, but only very slightly.)

Millions now living will never die!

I am almost totally ignorant of Mexican culture, but of course I have seen many images of Mexican people in which they seem to be mocking death, like in the film. I've wondered whether the mockery helps bring the fear level down a few notches.

Also I just read your "Ask Nezua" columns last night, and the image of people sneaking into their "dim rooms" to whisper questions to the computer, questions that maybe they're afraid to ask even their own mothers ... there's something very science-fiction about your image there.

So, my joke was, being frozen alive in liquid nitrogen, like Ted Williams' brain, or being pumped full of "nano robots" ... these things sound even more horrifying than just dying.

:-(

I had a sort of humor blog for a while, and even my brother had to ask me what the joke was half the time.

jeje...dont sweat it!

thanks for the words about the dim rooms.

i've read a lot of sci-fi growing up. and i feel we are sort of sci fi living nowadays. damn. i mean i remember eight-track players in our car. maybe we just had a real old car. no, i remember reel-to-reel in our library when i was in first grade, learning how to use it. times were analog, adobe, honey.

now we "skin" our browsers, send pictures on our cell phones to other people, we tap into wi-fi, we have ads targeted to our spending habits. we are in Sci-Fi dont you forget it!

Heh, we had an 8-track too. It made this huge clunking sound when it changed tracks, like a staple gun.

You're right that we're in Sci Fi, but it's a strange, edgy kind of Sci Fi, lots of fiction and relatively little science. These guys typing whole (sort of) sentences into Google as if it were some kind of oracle or god. Credential-bearing scientists from MIT (Drexler) inventing strange happy religions around tiny robots that don't exist -- and that IMO would be fucking deadly weapons if they did exist.

500 years of Catholicism, and people still haven't completely forgotten that "death is a fact of life :-)"

I'm wondering if Tim Burton didn't borrow from the Mexican playfulness with death, and the sneaking suspicion that (after)life goes on pretty much as it always has.

For Tom's benefit, the cartoonish calaveras in the film (I'm sure everyone got the pun on "hasta luego") are based on the works of the late 19th century graphic artist Jose Guadalupe Posadas. The cabaret singer is la Catarina, one of the most beloved dead people in Mexico. You'll see her in Diego Rivera's late mural, Dream of a Sunday Afternoon between Posadas and Rivera (who seemed to be the model for Pugsly Addams!).

I put together a "tour" of my favorite Mexico City cemeteries here

i see what you mean about burton, rich! i love "nightmare before christmas," and throught hat lens, i can see what you mean.

as always, thanks for the historical tip, my friend.

Thank you, Richard. I'll check out the link!

As maybe you sensed, I wanted to ask, can I get some help on tuning in to a culture that maybe deals with death a little less hysterically than my own?

I'm Catholic myself, at least in principle. Are you saying that Catholicism is opposed to remembering that death is a part of life?

me fascina!