Ibsen Martínez is a Venezuelan playwright and essayist who needs no introductions. His latest OpEd for the New York Times links the Spear murders, telenovela productions, Teodoro Petkoff, and scarcity to paint a smorgasbord of the surreal reality of Venezuela’s TV industry.
The money quote:
This violence seems far away from the sleek air-conditioned studios where our telenovela is produced, but the scarcity of essential goods, inexplicable in a wealthy petrostate, affects us all. Every so often, filming is interrupted when a cast or crew member receives a text message alert that some staple is available at a nearby supermarket. The studio empties before the rationed stock of toilet paper, milk or corn flour runs out.
Many Venezuelan telenovela actors also moonlight as theater players, but rampant kidnappings and armed robberies have cast a melancholy, self-imposed curfew over Caracas’s once glamorous night life, limiting what actors can do off the set.
Caracas Chronicles 
Nowadays the Theater, concerts, and so on, starts at 6 pm, instead of 8 pm…
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Una pregunta fuera del tema. ¿que paso con el pana de distortionland?
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Kudos for the usage of a Swedish word :P Smörgåsbröd :P
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Fuera del tema, but I love the fact that a writer has Ibsen as a first name. :-)
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He is a hell of a good writer, both savagely, mordant , suavely sarcastic , regaling the reader with original and clever insights , good at writing easy smooth readable prose with a dash of literary elegance . He can also be temperamental and of course has an uncanny capacity for the conveyance of a kind of wry but feisty humour . This piece shows him at his best .!! Thanks for posting it.
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