Sound Taste

Good-will hunting and sonic weapons

A NYT piece last week about the 1950s USIA program to have jazz musicians tour "hot spots" around the world to improve the image of the US prompted a lively email discussion among a group of friends, some frequent Sound Taste commenters.

One of the key questions was, if the govt. were to embark on a similar program today, what would it look like, given the diminished grab that jazz has?

We all agreed that hip hop is the equivalent globalized musical form that is nonetheless squarely identified with American cool. But how would it work?

Robert (aka Sovietiko) asked

Pero si es Hip Hop, que considero el mayor export de U.S.A ahora mismo, entonces quien seria?  Los que estan rapeando de to'el billete q tienen? Taria duro enviar un artista a Iran a que le diga a ellos "Pana, nadamas el reloj mio vale mas que lo que tu vas a hacer en un ano !!"
o Black Eye Peas con "mi hump, mi hump" ?

If it's hip hop, which I think is the biggest US export right now, then who would it be? The ones rapping about all the money they have? It would be rough to send an artist to Iran to rap "Son, just the watch I'm wearing is worth more than what you make in a year" or Black Eyed Peas with their "my hump, my hump."

This recent piece about Nas made me think he'd be an intriguing choice.

Kiko didn't think it would work at all today.

Como intercambio cultural, cool. Pero NADA tiene ese tipo de relevancia hoy en dia. DONDEQUIERA tan haciendo jazz, rock, hip-hop, etc. Si ha de ir alguien a'pero--o por lo menos popular--el bulto se lo harian, pero de seguro ya ellos tienen su version criolla. Por ej, cuando Paul McCartney toca en Moscú, el bulto no es por el rock, sino porq el es un ex-Beatle.

As a cultural exchange, cool. But NOTHING has that sort of relevance these days. Jazz, rock, hip hop etc. is being made EVERYWHERE. If someone great -- or at least popular -- were to go, the public would love it, but surely they have their own local version. Eg, when Paul McCartney plays Moscow, the big deal is not that it's rock, but that he's an ex-Beatle.

We disagreed a bit on this point. To me, local versions do not entirely substitute for the "authenticity" still credited to, say, gangsta rap stars.

And I totally agreed with Jorge's musical osmosis via military invasion theory:

pensandolo bien, es muy posible ke esten mandando mas artistas de lo ke pensamos ya ke a estas alturas hay tropas gringas en todas partes del universo, or so it seems...

thinking it over, it's quite possible the US govt. is sending out more artists than we think, given that US troops are all over the universe, or so it seems...

American music has often been imported via military occupation (e.g. Dee Dee Ramone first heard rock n roll as an army brat in Germany, and Japan developed a strong jazz culture fed by the American military presence there post-WWII). A couple of folks have started looking at the playlists of soldiers in Iraq & Afghanistan. I wonder how much of that music is filtering locally.

Thinking about this the past couple of days, I guess that the more interesting cultural exchange can no longer be government-sponsored, not just because there's no one with decent taste left working in government, but because it was a pretty suspect endeavor in the first place.

I think the interesting stuff is happening more at the NGO/indy level. Jeff Chang argues here that although gangsta rap is the soundtrack of the world (especially in conflict zones) there might be some room for more "conscious" hip hop to spread grassroots to various non-Western locales.

Not to say I have a rose-colored vision of the possibilities of cultural exchange, given recent co-optations of anthropologists and other social scientists by the military. Michael at La Guayabita wondered whether ethno/musicologists are likewise being recruited. Seeing recent uses of music as a weapon, I woudn't doubt it.

[1958 pix of Dave Brubeck in Baghdad from Brubeck collection via NYT; pix of Nas by Justin Stephens via NY Mag; pix of soldier w iPod via weikhang.com]

What happened to rock en español?

The first cover piece I ever wrote (many moons ago) was for the SF Weekly, on a Mexican rock band called Maldita Vecindad, which was going on its first US tour, and on the (then) growing phenomenon of home-grown Latin American rock. This predated the marketing term "rock en español" by a couple of years.

The blooming of RNE scenes in the early to mid-90s in Latin America and the US was a heady experience to live through. I'd grown up a Dominican rockera/punk, which even in NYC made me a freak. So hearing Mexican kids worship the electric guitar and sing in DF slang felt like home.

I became part of the SF rockero scene, befriending bands, writing about them in the alternative press and in a local zine, going to every show from Berkeley Square's Rockola on Sunday nights to warehouse shows in San Jose. I even wrote a piece in Spin that claimed that RNE was one of the ten harbingers of the future in rock. 1995 was a good year.

More than a decade later, though, aside from Aterciopelados, Café Tacuba and Kinky, few Latin American bands (and no U.S. Latino bands) are known outside of a small subculture. Part of that is the fact that the U.S. music public has pretty much splintered into nothing but subcultures -- with the exceptions of globalized hip hop/pop -- but part of that was the colony collapse disorder that hit the U.S. RNE scenes starting about 1997.

What made me think about this was a recent Mun2 piece forwarded to me by Enrique Lavin trying to retrospectively analyze what happened to Latin American rock. The writer interviewed several folks who were in the trenches from the get-go, like Elena Rodrigo, who was a manager, show organizer, and worked at the first Latin rock indie in the US, Aztlán Records, and Ed Morales, who at the late, great Village Voice was like me one of a handful of Latino writers championing the "movimiento"; label peeps Tomás Cookman and Camilo Lara and other scenesters, organizers and promoters.

Their basic post-mortem is: RNE was a niche music, the term was a marketing imposition, reggaetón/hip hop is more "universal" and easier to market, the industry never properly supported the genre.

Of the comments on why U.S.-based bands never blew up the way Latin American bands did, I agree the most with Ed Morales' comment:

As much as I liked bands like Pastilla, Volumen Cero and Maria Fatal, I think the bands that developed in the U.S. didn't have as much quality and grassroots support as bands from Latin America. When bands like Caifanes, Fabulosos Cadillacs, Tacvba and Aterciopelados toured the U.S., I saw tremendous enthusiasm. I also saw them play in Latin America and there was even more enthusiasm. These bands represented the passion of Latin American kids who, for the most part, have a more difficult life than kids in the U.S. They also represent an organic part of a local Latin American culture. The U.S. bands did not represent "community" in the same way, despite their talent and passion.

Here are my dos cheles of analysis. It was basically a failure of infrastructure.

The industry: Definitely there was never the proper support, bc labels saw Latinos as a niche market, and Latin rockeros as a niche within a niche. They're just barely catching on to how big Mexican regional (another marketing invento) is. And as Morales points out, by the time RNE arrived, the major label ship had already sprung a big leak. With few exceptions (usually on public/independent radio), neither rock nor Spanish-language radio ever made any space for RNE. Only places like Tower or Ritmo Musical carried the stuff. And the mainstream music press fell into the "perpetual novelty" syndrome. Even into the early 2000s, I was asked by editors to explain that, yes, Latin Americans and Latinos listened to and made rock music.

Venues/touring: In the halcyon days of the mid-1990s, SF had several weekly/monthly spaces that booked bands from abroad and local bands. LA had even more. And NYC had a few: Brownies, the Spiral, La Kueva (which I always despised), and a couple of others. La Kueva still exists, in a seriously diminished form, and D'Antigua in Jax Hts has some shows but finding a show takes a lot of active effort. When there is a regular venue where you can expect a certain kind of show to happen, you keep up with their bills. Even in the email list/MySpace age, it takes a lot of effort to find where and when shows are in NY. Only LA really still has a vital scene. But even back then, few bands toured beyond their immediate area. Lack of venues made it difficult to put together a tour, so bands lost out on one of the tried-and-true ways to build a public.

Scenes/Audience: While there were significant regional differences, I don't entirely buy the idea that East Coast, West Coast, Miami, Chicago and TX were too dissimilar to amount to a cohesive "scene." Witness the punk/hardcore "movement" of the 80s. There were massive regional differences, yet people felt connected to a larger thing. I had that same feeling at the start of RNE (btw, I hate the term too, but it's a convenient shorthand), but I never saw the level of DIY I had seen with punx.   

Musical quality: This is a big bugaboo, which a couple of the Mun2 interviewees mention (esp. re: Pastilla, Maria Fatal, Volumen Cero). A lot of US-based bands either stayed safely within the confines of their subgenre (power pop, heavy metal) without making their music as polished as a glass marble, or took on the mestizo aesthetic (Latin American traditional rhythms plus electric guitar or ska) and never fully digested all their influences. As I think Kiko has said to me, the seams always showed. Most gave it up before making a breakthrough. Remember when Luaka Bop signed local heroes King Changó and we thought that was it? RNE needed its Malcolm McLaren, its Bernie Rhodes, its Ian MacKaye.

When people say that the Latin American groups were better, they forget that what we saw here in the US was the cream of the crop of the entire continent (that's where MTV Latin America and the Latin American subsidiaries of labels come in).

Maybe it's that old desire for "transcendence," to fit into an international market, that ends up compromising the sound/vision of the groups. I'm thinking of No Wave which was tiny, tiny movement, but some people argue was tremendously influential. (It was for me, and it did give the world Sonic Youth, though I think the claims of ultimate "importance" are a little overstated).

Are there good Latin American rock bands now? Sure. And I don't just mean the usual suspects. Are there good US-based bands? Probably, though I basically have to stumble on them online. They have ZERO industry resources available to them, since the labels have decided that the best bang for the buck is with bands from the big countries (Mexico-Colombia-Argentina) who have large national audiences, play well in other parts of Latin America and play well in the US. Never mind bands from Central America or the DR/PR, or Andean groups, eg.

Clearly, I could go on for days on this subject.

[image of Maldita's self-titled debut album via wikipedia; Kinky pix by hookm3up via flickr; Ian MacKaye pix via Aquarius Records]

"Stupid design"

Summer's a little more random, so enjoy, as I did, a great science lesson, courtesy of the only Black astrophysicist most of us know, Neil deGrasse Tyson. (thanks to Liza at Culture Kitchen for the tip).

Be warned: The slide show includes nasty pix of fetuses with birth defects.

DeGrasse Tyson suggests that better engineering would have given us, like dolphins, separate orifices for eating and breathing, to cut down on the possibility of choking. But my favorite line comes near the end: "What is up with what's between our legs? An entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system. No engineer would ever design that."

I've been stunned hearing what I thought were educated, intelligent people buy into the stupidity of an anthropomorphic higher being consciously designing specifics of life on earth and the universe (as opposed to designing the rules that allow those things to happen).

NdGT is not just a fortunate affirmative action spokesman for science, but one of the rare people who has both the abstract skills of the scientist and the social-verbal skills of the poetic streetcorner philosophizer.

We should all be able to explain basic science in a way the inner 8-year-old in us can understand. But fewer of us understand basic science concepts well enough to explain it even to ourselves. Hence, the gap that religious know-nothings have exploited. So go out and ponder the principle of the lever.

What's up with John Leguizamo?

Hangin' with the Homeboys is not only one of my favorite reel New York movies and a great exploration of male friendships, but to date it's one of John Leguizamo's best naturalistic roles. And those are far and few in between.

Leguizamo is usually best when his performances border on the ridiculous. For every Summer of Sam or Romeo and Juliet, where his Tex Avery mania works, there are goo explosions like The Pest and Spawn, or lugubrious messes like Love in the Time of Cholera. Leguizamo has only occasionally translated his onstage genius into a good cinematic groove.

He sometimes falls into a cliché of himself. In the recent Paraiso Travel (which screened at the Tribeca Film Fest but not sure when it's going into general release), he is once again the bitchy queeny gay/tranny (see To Wong Foo and several character skits in his theater work). Paraiso trailer here.

Leguizamo is super talented but needs directors with an inner crackhead to channel his craziness. Hence, Spike Lee, Baz Luhrmann and George Romero get him. Ironically, while he seems a living cartoon, I have never liked any of his comic book, video game or animation roles (I'm on the fence about Ice Age). And I give him credit for doing what few Latino actors do, appearing in Latin American productions (Crónicas, Paraiso Travel).

For a while, he kinda disappeared, but this year he's back with a vengeance. Aside from Paraiso Travel and The Happening, which opens Friday, he's coming out in Alfredo de Villa's Humboldt Park with Freddie Rodriguez, Righteous Kill and The Ministers. I know little about the last two, and have no high hopes for the Shyamalan flick. But let's see how he makes out in the Chicago-set drama.

Tonight, he's going to be giving a talk sponsored by the NYT. Alas, the event is sold out. But there'll be plenty of him to go around for the remainder of 2008 (he'll also be onstage in a play he did not write, American Buffalo. Hmmm.)

The Black Brown Divide: a wee rant

Don't get me started on all the crap that's been slung around about the Latino vote -- whether brown people are willing to vote for a Black president.

But what I will get started about is how sick I am of Latinos who fan the flames of the manufactured "race war" that's supposedly taking place between African-Americans and (immigrant) Latinos.

Today's exhibit A: a piece by Ernesto Quiñonez in this month's Esquire in a section about "the new bigotry" (which is pretty much the same ol' bigotry; just so happens it's "new" to the Esquire lads).

At only 436 words, the article sure slings a lot of crap. Let's start with the massive misunderstanding of Dominican culture and history contained herein:

RFK is the martyr of choice on Mexican Americans’ walls, while the late white-skinned president Joaquín Balaguer presides over Dominican barbershops across Manhattan’s Washington Heights.

Balaguer, the post-Trujillo dictator lite, unleashed a wave of repression that basically created Washington Heights as a community. Most 1960s and 1970s migrants, who went into exile for their lives, would only put Balaguer up on the wall to use as a dart board.

Never seen his portrait in a barbershop, either. (Note: the photo illustrating this point is of reformista headquarters in 2000, when Balaguer was running for office.) There are Balaguer-worshipping reformistas out there for sure, but it's just not common. (And um, JFK is the patron saint of Mexican-Americans, not his brother.)

As for the list of "evidence" that Quiñonez puts forth demonstrating how Latinos hate blacks, it's inconclusive at best, and at worst, it once again places U.S. yardsticks on Latin American cultural mores.

Is there anti-Black racism in Latin America? Absolutely. But does that automatically translate into anti-African-American feelings and acts consistently and across the board? Um, no.

There are resentments, misunderstandings, real political struggle between the groups, but that's less "Latin American racism" than plain ol' divide and conquer. We have bought into the idea that there is a scarcity of power, and that we have to fight to the end to keep the crumbs we're allowed.

Also, we have gone along with the rules of U.S. racial discourse, by which whites only see Blacks in racial discussions. Some of us are tired of waiting to be included in conversations. But instead of turning frustrations to those controlling the conversation, we turn it on Blacks.

Let's not forget that a lot of us learned we were basically Black here and have learned about common oppressions thanks to white supremacy.

[Shepard Fairey Obama poster via boing boing; Balaguer supporter pix via Esquire]

Red Hook Food Vendors update

For much of the last three decades, Memorial Day weekend has been the traditional opening day for the Red Hook Fields food vendors. Chowhounds and other foodies have watched the date like birders waiting in Capistrano.

But the weekend has come and gone, and no vendors. A few have been sighted at the Brooklyn Flea in Fort Greene. Even though Parks & Rec granted them a six-year permit in March, it wasn't clear whether all the vendors would be able to return, given all the expenses involved in meeting Dept. of Health requirements.

I was about to check with vendor rep Cesar Fuentes when I ran across this interview with him at Porkchop Express, which has been at the forefront of documenting and defending the vendors.

The good news: it's almost certain all of the vendors will return, and the new permit allows them to expands days of operation.

The meh: the look will be different, with carts instead of the mercado-looking tents.

The ugly: the new costs -- an added $30,000 for some -- mean that they really need all those folks who defended them to put their money where their mouth is.

César, the son of one of the vendors, has become a great rep for the group. He's passionate, poised and politic. The latter, seeing how he's made sure to speak in a way that does not risk his relations to the city agencies that control the vendors' destiny, had me
carefully reading his responses.

PE: How much do you think race, language and immigration played into the city's crackdown?
CF: This is certainly a very touchy subject, and I have heard compelling arguments that these were some of the reasons behind the city's crackdown. I also believe the vendor's increased fame and notoriety accelerated this process, along with general changes to the area. It might also simply have been 'our time' to face compliance. I can't help but think that it was a collection of all these factors, and that one word sums it all up: gentrification.

This is the closest that Cesar has come to pointing the finger at the racial/gentrification factor in public. The funny thing is, I never quite understood why the vendors bothered the city so much. They are set up in the middle of fields that, guess what, gentrifying whites do not use.

The closest housing to the fields is basically the projects, the sort of factor that normally provides a buffer to clean-up efforts. But I guess that some think the coming of Ikea and Fairway (not to mention all the cute businesses along Van Brunt) will finally change the area, i.e., make it safe for the bougie whites.

But the funny thing is that, as I talked about in my "emotional eminent domain" post, newcomers with money (and even in Red Hook, one has to have $$$ to buy these days) always want a little color with their convenience. Fairway and the vendors.

According to Cesar, the soccer games that were the original reason for the vendors to set up have declined. (I can confirm that: when I first covered the vendors a decade ago, the games were lively; these days, they are merely background, with only the players' families as spectators.)

Since many of our patrons now pay less mind to soccer than to Huaraches, the vendors have become the main attraction. When Red Hook was rediscovered, so were the food vendors. Still, vendors' reactions were mixed: some adapted quickly, others more gradually.... They could have easily relocated to other fields in the city with a stronger Latino presence, but didn't – even if they felt anger or initial resentment towards the change. And in a very human way, the vendors have adapted to change in the way they operate and do business, welcoming new crowds without sacrificing their authenticity.

I'm with Cesar. The vendors have adapted to the changing market but retained a strong identity. And I don't think that the audience is mostly non-Latino. When I've done informal surveys in the last couple of years, there have been plenty of Latinos there. It's just that they too are mostly there for the food and not the games.

In either case, be on the lookout for the return of the vendors, possibly in another couple of weeks. Look for the news here or at Porkchop's site.

[pix of huaraches, plantain balls and ceviche from last year's market by me]

The Practice of Everyday Music

I’m not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.... The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world’s popular music is a good thing, for the most part.

David Byrne, discussing his current intriguing project, "Playing the Building."

It's not the first time the insightful Byrne has pondered the future of music. He's talked about it here, here and here, among other places.

I guess what struck me the most in the quote above was the image of music-making returning to a more generalized practice, a part of everyday life, rather than something reserved for "professionals."

When I visited Morocco a couple of years ago, a couple of wacky Spaniards (there's always a couple of wacky Spaniards in every Morocco story) latched onto my group's Sahara excursion. They brought rum, wine, kif and a guitar. They sang Joan Manuel Serrat and the Beatles. They jammed with the Berber guides. Were they great? No. But they made the evening so much more fun.

One of my lifelong regrets is not playing an instrument (I know, it's never too late, but integrating practices into my schedule is more than I can manage right now). Used to be that at Latin house parties, there would be live music, not because people knew musicians, but because someone brought instruments, there was a common corpus of songs and everyone was encouraged to participate.

This doesn't mean that everyone was equally good -- talent still counts -- but that being OK was fine. It was about participating in a collective activity.

When we discussed the role of music in community-making in my Puerto Rican culture class this semester, we found out that none of my 15 students knew how to sing or play an instrument. Which cuts them, us, off from alternate ways of transmitting knowledge. Talking is not always the best way to communicate.

Even with the accessibility of digital music-making means, I see too few of us taking up music as fun, as a relaxing form of self-expression, as communal activity. Most kids I see, once they get past a certain age, can only see music as a commodity.

Phenomena like American Idol is both antidote and symptom: at the start, you have "regular people" who can (allegedly) sing well. But the point is not just the approval of the collective, but the possibility of using the contest as a short-cut into the market. Even runners-up get recording contracts. Otherwise, they're real losers.

Latinas opened the door for gay marriage, Pt. 2

This week we found out New York has opened a back-door way to legalize gay marriage in the state. And once again, like I wrote about here, there's a courageous Latina setting precedent.

Gov. David Paterson's decision to have state agencies draw up rules consistent with accepting same-sex marriages performed in places where it is legal to do so (such as Canada, Massachusetts and, maybe soon, California) was based on a court case decided a few months back, Martinez v. Monroe County.

Rochester residents Patricia Martinez and Lisa Ann Golden won the right to have Martinez's health benefits as a community college administrator extended to her spouse, who she'd married in Canada in 2004. Not a shocker that health insurance has become important enough to warrant enduring a rough, invasive court proceeding.

The case was reported when the decision came down, and was clearly recognized as a precedent-setter. The news this week in the low-key directive drafted by the gov's legal counsel was that by asking state agencies to revise their policies and regulations to recognize same-sex marriages performed legally elsewhere, Paterson was institutionalizing a potentiality.

Let me be clear. I'm not a defender of the importance of marriage as a concept. After all, the institution was invented to control women and property (thanks, Engels!). But seeing families and couples denied rights automatically granted to any random married couple is just wrong.

[Pix of Patricia Martinez and Lisa Ann Golden via NYT]

Who's local? NYers and belonging

"No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey's, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. That before the internet cafe plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now." (Colson Whitehead, "City Limits," The Colossus of New York)

It's the eternal fight. Who belongs here? Who gets to claim New Yorker status? Who are the arrivistes and who are the natives?

My family's been here since 1959, I was born here, went to public school, have witnessed the city up close and personal for at least half of my life. I have no doubts about my New York-ness. But there are others who can also claim it.

When Whitehead's essay came out, it hit a chord with me and all my old New York friends. It was a point of connection between us native-born and those who had gone native. But it still required a price of entry. While Whitehead focuses on personal geographies, what is implied is a series of relationships, not just to sites, but to communities.

Which brings me to a couple of pieces that came out this week. David Gonzalez, the NY Times' BoogieRican conscience, wrote a post in the City Room blog about the unbearable whiteness (and occasional blackness) of the city's "Ask a Local" tourism campaign.

David has several beefs, but one is that of all the celebs featured in the ads, 80% are white and none are Latino, in a city that's currently 27% Latino. NYC&Co. said that Willie Colón will be in a future ad, as will America Ferrera (Mexican Ugly Betty is from Jackson Heights; Honduran America is from LA).

But the deeper issue is that the celebs featured, whether only nominal NYers (Jimmy Fallon?) or bona fide New Yorky people (Debbie Harry, born and raised in New Jersey), end up giving very Manhattan-below-96th St.-centric advice, as if there is nothing to see in the nabes where non-whites live.

This was one of the reasons I co-wrote Nueva York. I wanted others to come to my city and do the sort of tourism I do when I travel. Check out different nabes, different groups within a city, their clubs, their markets, their everyday lives. But NYC&Co. (which was supremely uninterested in our project) has no imagination.

Then there was the hanging-on-a-slim-thread cover story in this week's New York magazine, another retread of Brooklyn as the site of anxiety over who "belongs" more: the "brownstoners" or the "bitter renters." All assumed to have access to home ownership if only they tried hard enough. Public housing people (never mind any Section 8 or been-in-the-hood-before-it-was-desirable folks) are only background at best, a nuisance at worst.

It's one of my basic beefs about changes in NY chemistry. The city has always had ambitious young white things moving in among the native poor. But it used to be they had to learn to get along. What's new is that people with $3M homes think that somehow entitles them to more rights about the space than their poorer neighbors. Call it emotional eminent domain.

[pix of my high school, Newtown, in Elmhurst, via forgotten-ny.com; Screen cap of Debbie Harry "Just Ask the Locals" ad via NYC&Co.; illustration for "The What You Are Afraid Of" via NY Mag]

No more stuff!

I saw this coming, and yet I wish that, for once, we had not followed the trend. There is now a site called Stuff Latin People Like. (The first post is dated April 4.)

You already know what this looks like. It's the same as Stuff White People Like and Stuff Black People Love (not to be confused with Stuff Educated Black People Like), except not even mildly funny (like I thought SWPL was, until I read Gary's spot-on critique here) and not even mildly telling about nonwhites' class anxieties (the way SEBPL is).

And what do we get for the wait? Novelas (#2) Pretend Relatives (#7) and Wal Mart (#15). These barely pass the Homer Simpson test (it's funny coz it's true) and would never get past the first go-around on those email chain letters (I still occasionally get the tried-and-true "you know you're Latino/Puerto Rican/Mexican/Dominican if..." lists, with proper local slang subbed in).

As Daniel Hernandez, among many others, said about SWPL, it was a list that had more to do with class/education/tribe than race/ethnicity.

The site seems to be suffering from the Guanabee syndrome: it must have seemed like a good idea late night and drunk, but the joke cannot be sustained past the first few entries. For satire done right, visit Ask a Mexican.

[image: SLPL banner]