The Faces May Change, Everything Else Remains the Same

Here is a picture of Dolores Del Rio, a famous Mexican actress from the 1920s to 1970s.  As you can ses, celeberties always presented themselves to the public in the best possible light.

I remember that about 20 years ago or so I read "The Way of Perfection" by Saint Teresa of Avila and she went into great detail talking how horrible it is living in a convent with a bunch of chatty nuns always gossiping abot each other.  Sound familiar.  My experience is if you put three or more women together for a long enough period of time they will be takling about each other and stiring up trouble.  Problem is Teresa lived in Spain in the 1500s.  Some things never change.

So perhaps you would rather hear about something else besides nuns from 500 years ago or the beginings of the Discalced Carmelite order.  Sometimes moving away from people and living with nobody but myself and God sounds appealing, but I don't think the monastic life will ever become part of my life.  Anyway that's not what I here to write about.

I was just surfing the web in one of my semi-drunk trances (Obviously not worrying about what future employers will find out about me on a deep web search, am I?)  I was looking at videos of turn-of-the-20th century recording and theater stars in South America, like Dolores Del Rio (just as sexy as Vanessa Del Rio I promise).  Of course I got to listen to Charlo (Madonna was not the first recording star to go by one name, you know).  What did I find?  The music was not very appealing.  While I like tango, the flamanco-type stuff that was in vogue in the 1900s and 1910s doesn't do anything for my ears.  What I did find impressive was the quality of the plublicity shots and the coreography in the short videos that appear on the computer.  Fantistico !  And even harder to make in the day when they did not have the equipment (I dare not say technology) we got today.  I mean these posters are good enough to appear on album covers today.

Not everyone in South America was Juan Valdez working on his coffee plantation, even in 1900.  There was a lot of wealth and talent down there as well.  And I was supprised that Latin America had just a vibrant film and recording industry as we did from the very begining, with just as many stars as we had, producing hundreds of records and films, yet none of us up north got to see them until recently.

Thank God for the Internet.  It helped save our history, contrary to what people were saying a decade or so.  (Back then they believed that contemporary culture would be inaccessible to future generations, because they wouldn't have the equipment to view it.)  Who said the stuff couldn't be migrated over to contemporary media just like happened to dolores delrio.