A Bonafied Guero Spills The Beans On A COVID Western!

 May 18, 2025

   Hard to escape the label of "Cultural Appropriation" these days. That's why I created this guy:

Daily Whip Out:

"El Guero de Divisadero"

   All the trappings of the stuff I dig, without the inevitable, "You have no right to appropriate someone else's culture. . ." condemnation. And, by the way, for all you non-Spanish speakers, guero is light-skinned and is an affectionate term, unlike gringo.

   Also, from time to time I return to a scene I am trying to capture. It was inspired from a line from Insurgent Mexico by John Reed: "the riders appeared on the ridgeline suspended in amber."

Daily Whip Out:

"Ridgeline Riders Suspended In Amber #33"

(A work in progress)

  Sometimes I see things in a different context, like this snapshot I took while talking to Craig Schepp on my patio yesterday.

Spaces

  Well, if you want a new version of the Western, it's about to land on July 18:

A COVID Western!

   There is a new COVID Western coming out that got a seven-minute-standing-ovation at Cannes last week and it is called Eddington. It's about a small town New Mexico sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) going up against a local politician (Pedro Pascal) in a run for mayor. Here is a snippet from an online review:

   "Set in 2020, amid the pandemic and the wave of Black Lives Matter protests that erupted after the police murder of George Floyd, Eddington initially cleaves to Aster’s usual character template. We are plunged into the daily doings of Sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix), an impulsive asthmatic who gets so mad about the state mandate requiring him to wear a mask that he decides to run for mayor against long-standing enemy Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal).

   "In parallel, Joe is losing his wife Louise (Emma Stone) to the web presence of budding cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak (a sparingly used, scene-stealing Austin Butler). Louise is suffering from a mysterious trauma, doesn’t like to be touched and refers to herself in the third person when stressed. In bouts of wellness, she makes creepy dolls that Joe pays his colleague to buy. Rounding out his household is mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who relishes nothing more than berating everyone – her voice is often heard off camera while Joe suffers in the foreground."

   ". . .The screenplay is as fluent in the language of identity politics as it is slogan-driven electioneering as it is Vernon’s sham guruspeak. Eddington stops shy of sermonising, even as it skewers a range of political postures. A young white man hosting a vigil for a murdered Hispanic man self-flagellates, “My job now is to listen, which I’ll do right after I’ve made this speech which I have no right to make!!!”

   "Micheal Ward stands out as the police officer justifying Joe’s comment that “a third of my department is Black!” (It’s a department of three.) His stoic demeanour is a study in micro-acting and when, after one injustice too many, it slips, it suddenly seems like Eddington is his film. But no, this is an ensemble effort. It has a sweep that shows that the Wild West still exists on the ground and online, and a keen eye for the people that grow in a sandy, mountain-flanked, lonely landscape.

—Sophie Monks Kaufman, The Independent 

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."

—Henry David Thoreau