Mexico: Workers resist power sell-off

Article originally published in Australia’s Green Left Weekly

Ruth Maclean

23 October 2009

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has tried to buyoff electricity workers facing redundancy as part of his campaign to privatise the state-owned power company Luz y Fuerza, by offering free English lessons on top of redundancy payments.

Acclaim for the unusual: Angels of Anarchy exhibition preview for the Gulf News

Female Surrealists, ignored for a long time, are accorded pride of place with a show that highlights their radical streak

• By Rachel Rickard Straus,Special to Weekend Review
• Published: 00:00 October 16, 2009

 

http://gulfnews.com/arts-entertainment/visual-arts/acclaim-for-the-unusual-1.514130

Mexican govt vs electricians

Road to nowhere

Last Saturday night, the Mexican president Felipe Calderon sent the army and the police into all the offices of Luz y Fuerza, forcing workers off the night shift.  Luz y Fuerza, one of the two biggest electricity companies in Mexico was being liquidated, the government announced: it was inefficient and had no place in a country in economic crisis.

Interview with Leonora Carrington in The Independent

Nazis, nannies and hair omelettes: Leonora Carrington, the last living Surrealist, looks back on her extraordinary life and times

Leonora Carrington was the toast of the Surrealists. Then she was forced to escape the Nazis, a Spanish mental asylum and her nanny, before fleeing to Mexico… Ahead of two exhibitions of her work, the 92-year-old reflects on a life less ordinary

Interview by Rachel Rickard Straus and Ruth MacLean

Sunday, 23 August 2009 

 

Reuters

In the biggest metropolis in the Western world, amid drug wars, earthquakes and swine flu, 92-year-old Leonora Carrington opens the biscuit tin resting on her oilskin Liberty tablecloth. “Do you want more tea?” England’s last living Surrealist asks politely.

Bronze statues, child-size casts of Carrington’s frighteningly powerful imagination, lurk throughout her Mexico City townhouse. A masked pig peers out from under a hat stand. Something half human skulks under the stairs. But Carrington is unfazed by monsters; she has been conjuring them all her life.

Gregory Fritz’s irreverent choreography

BY RUTH MACLEAN

Special to The News

“Contemporary dance is boring and pretentious,” says Gregory Fritz,  himself a contemporary choreographer.

Spencer Tunick interview

BY RUTH MACLEAN

Special to The News

“I’m not as famous as you would think. Not my face,” says Spencer Tunick.

“Andy Warhol’s famous. Damien Hirst is famous. I’m well-known. No one stops me on the street.”