Monday

On Saturday, military airplanes and helicopters began regularly flying over Oaxaca City. These flyovers persisted throughout the weekend and have increased today. Troop carriers arrived in nearby Huatulco over the weekend.* Protest groups have begun fortifying barricades with tree trunks. Interior Secretary Carlos Abascal insists that the military presence is routine stuff, and yet tension mounts. Today, bellicose protestors have been lighting off fireworks; on Sunday several banks were burnt. Fox is now saying that he is willing to resolve this the easy way or the hard way. It is a pitch black stroke of--what, irony? tragedy?--that today is the thirty-eighth anniversary of the student massacre in México City’s Tlatelolco Square in 1968,* where as many as three hundred students were killed when federal troops opened fire on political demonstrators. Far to the north, Americans and Mexicans are coming together to denounce the border fence. México urges Bush to veto the bill* (he's never liked it much), and US environmentalists continue to tally the possible ecological impact. Apparently, several publicly-funded initiatives, including conservation areas, will be curtailed, or scrapped altogether, because of this scheme.* Last night's horror festival screening was Deer Woman,* directed by John Landis for Showtime's Masters of Horror series. I've long had a love/hate relationship with Landis, whose core motivations in filmmaking seems to be to find the pop jokey veneer over whatever cultural perspective he has decided to adopt. His normal milieu is quirk Americana rather than horror, but the times when these labels have elided, he's churned out some notable stuff: An American Werewolf in London, the underappreciated Innocent Blood, and now this. Deer Woman is one of the best things he's done, as usual underlining the ridiculous qualities of creature feature horror, relying on well-performed solid characters and impertinent mischief. [Cavin]