MTV and the Border Patrol.

When we finished Alien Toy I received a call asking me about including the truck in a music video. The video was going to be directed by Doug Aitken. At the time I did not know who he was. He contacted me through Cameron Jamie. The music video was for Fatboy Slim and the song was The Rockafeller Skank. I did not know neither who Fatboy Slim was so I called my friend B+ who works with rappers and musicians to find out. B+ told me to hold on and wait for a better opportunity to show the truck in a video of an artist better known. I told the producer that Salvador “Chava” Muñoz wouldn’t dance the truck for less than $500, which was the amount he was getting at car shows. The producer accepted and Chava needed the money.

Eventually the song became a huge hit. Somehow the aesthetic of the video is very similar to Miguel Calderón’s work. The truck is painted like a border patrol but it does not say that. This has some particular meaning and humor to the people that recognize that.

The Ringmaster.

I took this photograph of Cameron Jamie in a punk taco stand in Mexico City some time ago.

“Le Maître du Ring”: Close to Me Against You: Cameron Jamie & Elke Krystufek, Georges Tony Stoll, Université de Rennes, Rennes, France, 1999, pp 7-11.

“We cannot understand cultural and literary life and the struggle of mankind’s historic past if we ignore that peculiar folk humor that always existed and was never merged with the official culture of the ruling classes.”

Mikhail Bakhtin

“Filthy Cameron” known in the great Tenochtitlan¹ as “El Camarón” was too skimpy to be accepted in Blue Demon’s academy² of wrestling but he did not quit. After visiting Santo’s grave³ and crawling on his kness until he bled at La Villa⁴ to see the Virgin, he joined the Super Barrio⁵ revolution. Super Barrio proved that superheroes exist and triggered the current democratic changes in Mexico after organizing poor people that lost their homes during the 1985 big earthquake. He preceded and perhaps inspired the big and head shaven American wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura in his now successful political career. Ventura got recently elected as Governor of the state of Minnesotta running as an independent. Recently in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies one of the members of the opposition wore the mask of a hog while the president was giving a speech. This action generated a fight when a conservative representative started to throw punches. Once again wrestling tactics proved to be more effective than most political performance done by artists. Are politics becoming spectacle or viceversa?

Master Doctor Sty⁶ transformed the little grasshoper into “Himself” by making the powerful portrait mask. A mask representing Cameron’s face. But this “Himself” is not necesarily him as Michael Jackson might not be himself neither and probably ourselves aren’t “Ourselves” neither. Nevertheless wrestling as “Himself” is a way to implicate himself as a participant at the same level of the game and not merely as an outsider voyeur or as the avant garde finding another fountain of youth. He has learned the magic power of the mask that has passed from the ancient priests to actual heroes like Blowfly⁷, El Santo, Superbarrio, Fray Tormenta⁸ and the Subcomandante Marcos⁹. The mask does not hide who you are but on the contrary, it reveals some real you. Wrestling and rock and roll are real mythological worlds were performers can transform and recreate their lives. He is Cameron Jamie and as “Himself” he challenged the man/woman/adult/kid/black/white, King of Pop, his majesty Michael Jackson in a classic “máscara vs máscara¹⁰” bout for his crown. Michael’s plastic surgery definitely has pushed the body spectacle beyond midget wrestling and André the Giant .

It is Cameron’s duty as a prodigal son of the heroes of "lucha libre¹¹" to pay his dues and to bring the fight from the public to the private space and viceversa. For that purpose he has substituted the arena for the apartment. He fights also regular men and woman sexualizing and questioning the maniquean battle between good and evil. Sexuality has always played an important part in wrestling as it can be seen in the flamboyant manners of gay wrestlers, in women wrestling or in related mutated spectacles such as mud wrestling but apartment wrestling seems to work in a different way. We can only see the matches as they are clumsily documented, unless we decide to fight them ourselves with our partners. We become voyeurs of some sort of bizarre amateur porn partially constructed and partially straight documentary were the only sexual explicit representation is a plastic butt. Real life, art and culture aren’t as easy to predetermined as a wrestling match and in Jamie’s fights the outcome is always uncertain and beyond the simple notions of Good and Evil. It is hard to define in these battles/affairs who is the "rudo¹² and who is the técnico¹³?

San Fernando Valley is one (if not the one) of the American suburbs, models of the inevitable feared dystopia that cities are becoming. Nevertheless the homogeneization of the architecture and urban planning has not resulted in cultural uniformity but in an unexpected ethnically and cosmopolitan petry dish were everything goes. Therefore Mexican wrestling coexists in the Valley with the porn industry. The dislocation of elements from the structured hierarchies of a former cultural system has affected sensitive people like Jamie that are turning suburbia into a center and finding El Dorado where nobody expects it.

Cameron Jamie fighting against his majesty the King of Pop Michael Jackson, has shown us how much we can create ourselves and how much we can’t.

The King is dead, long live the King!.

1. The Aztec name of the city now known aas Mexico City.
2. Blue Demon was the blue masked wrestler partner of El Santo in the memorable movie “Santo & Blue Demon against the Guanajuato Mummies”. His academy of wrestling is the most important wrestling school.
3. El Santo is the most popular Mexican wrestler ever. He wore a silver mask and his tomb is lost in a mausoleum that resembles a modern housing project.
4. La Villa is the place where the Virgin of Guadalupe supposedly appeared and where her basilica is
5. Super Barrio wrestles for the people wearing a yellow and red mask and cape and drives the Superbarriomobile to demonstrations and where he is needed.
6. Doctor Sty is a master mask maker and one of the legends of the “lucha libre” world.
7. Actually Blowfly is not a wrestler but an African American singer and rapper precursor that sings hilarious sexual explicit songs. Somehow he dresses like a wrestler wearing a mask with antennas.
8. Fray Tormenta is a wrestling priest that fights to support an orphan house.
9. The Subcomandante Marcos is one of the leaders of the insurrected masked Indians of the Zapatista Liberation Army. He sends poetic communiqués through the Internet. The government claims that he is a teacher of semiotics from the Metropolitan University and publish a photograph of his attributed face. This move backfired. He offered to take out his mask and show his face but people voted against it. Now there is a popular slogan that says: “We are all Marcos”.
10. "Máscara vs. máscara" means mask vs mask. Whoever losses has to take out his mask and show who he really is.
11. Also known as Mexican wrestling
12. "Rudo" literally means rough. These are the bad guys, the ones that cheat in order to win.
13. "Técnico" means technician. These are the good guys, the wrestlers that use their technique and ability to win.