Intersections

Hip-hop kiddie TV taking over: It's 'Yo Gabba Gabba!'

My brother Sergio was the first to introduce me a while back to "Yo Gabba Gabba!," a TV show aimed at kids that he was almost as excited about as my nephew, Eligh, his youngest of two. No. He was basically a lot more excited about it than Eligh appeared to be. I quickly saw why.

Toddlers are the target audience, of course, but with that unmistakable hip-hop flavor and humor, and all those cool celebrity guest spots, "Yo Gabba Gabba!" is the kind of kiddie show that is drawing ardent adult fans. And inevitably, stoner college kids.

But now I gotta go, cuz there's a party in my tummy.

The creeping march of narco violence in Mexico

The war between Mexico's cartels and law enforcement agencies reached a chilling new height this week. Assassins ambushed the acting chief of Mexico's federal police, Edgar Millan Gomez, as he walked into his apartment in Col. Guerrero in Mexico City early Thursday morning. The papers are saying the Millan Gomez murder is the work of the Sinaloa cartel. Put in perspective, this means violent criminal organizations are engaged in low-grade, pinpointed warfare against the whole Mexican law and order infrastructure -- and they're winning.

Thursday's high-profile assassination throws the country's entire anti-narco effort into a state of uncertainty, while narcotics continue to flow north and the killings go on incessantly. So far 1,000 people have died in the narco war this year alone. It just doesn't stop. It was another bloody week in the Mexican north, with a sex crimes investigator killed brutally in her driveway in Juarez on Monday. And just this morning, gunmen shot and killed a high-ranking federal anti-kidnapping agent, also here in Mexico City.

Read more at "Sex crimes investigator assassinated in Juarez."

* Photo above, federal officers salute recently fallen police, by AP via the L.A. Times.

Immigration check-points, while driving, yes, south

That's right. As immigrants are leaving the country, federal agents have been staging check-points and rounding people up. The L.A. Times, reporting from the San Diego-Tijuana border, says that ICE is actually defending this policy. In the article by Richard Marosi, a population-control reactionary argues that immigrants who are arrested as they leave the United States could become "ambassadors of enforcement" once they eventually reach Mexico with their hard-earned dollars. As my mom would say, ¡Ya, esto es el colmo!

But this is the sort of officially defended government inanity and criminally wasteful use of resources that we've come to expect in the Bush Era. It's a long list of outrageous stories that gradually work to erode and disrupt the country's little remaining links to decency and reason, and we can only hope that with a Barack Obama presidency, finally, something might change. Might.

* L.A. Times photo above by Mark Boster.

Lurid advertising: 'That's why she's my mommy'

This is a billboard that shows a beautiful young mother shielding the eyes of her child from something awful, maybe a traffic accident, or a bloody crime scene. The image feels taut and in motion. It is clearly playing to the culture of fear in Mexico City -- fear of kidnappings, fear of freak calamities, fear of death. At the same time it is nodding at the mystique of motherhood that still dominates concepts of Mexican femininity.

So what's it selling? Why, it's Nido, the decidedly non-threatening milk powder. It's a whole campaign, by the way, saying essentially, If you're a good Mexican mother, you'll cover your kid's eyes from a horrible sight, and you'll buy him Nido. This particular billboard was spotted on the speedy north-south artery Calzado de Tlalpan, near the surface station of metro Portales.

* Link: "Exploiting Real Fears with 'Virtual Kidnappings'."

Resistencia: Rocking on May Day in Mexico City

Here are some pscyhobilly kids hanging out at a music festival during May Day on Thursday. The Rebel Cats played, and so did Los Pardos, the Rude Boys, and many others. Half-way through the day I remember thinking, "Oh my, every day is Coachella in Mexico City!"

Read more at my latest 'Letter from Mexico City,' "Searching for real resistance on May Day," at LA Daily.