Sound Taste

Friday Prodigio

Here's another bonbon for accordion month, this time my favorite representative of new-school perico ripiao.

Perico ripiao, a fast version of merengue played with button accordion, tambora & metal güira, was a regional form from the Cibao region that was popularized nationally during the Trujillo era (see material in this excellent Paul Austerlitz book for the historical background. Dominican scholar Dagoberto Tejeda has also written some great stuff, which alas is not readily available here in los países).

Perico ripiao was displaced from the center of Dominican popular music in the 50s and 60s by so-called orchestral merengue (really big-band, analogous to mambo bands in NY) and later by the nimble, funk- and rock-influenced merengues of the likes of Johnny Ventura and Wilfrido Vargas.

But perico ripiao never really went away, and it's remained a viable genre. In the early 90s, I found a couple of amazing compilations of perico ripiao, which had been rebranded as merengue típico. There were older stars, like El Cieguito de Nagua, and younger players, like La India Canela (one of the few women accordionists around).

There's a thriving perico ripiao scene in NYC, which Sidney Hutchinson has documented and is writing about. And in that scene, El Prodigio, né Krency García, is an undisputed star.

I've been dying to see this guy live, but he only seems to play Monday nights in the middle of the Bronx or at 3 am in Bushwick.

The video below is shaky, but not the worst of the bunch on YouTube. The song below is "El Refrán (Rebeca)," which he performs often. Watch first the sax-accordion combo, then about a minute and a half into the song, Prodigio tears it up. Sound quality varies wildly, but enjoy anyway.

Jailhouse merengue

While in the clink last week, merengue de calle star Omega made good use of his time, writing a new song, "Dueño," which you can preview below in a bare-bones video filmed in the Najayo jail. (Thx to remolacha for highlighting the video.)

The song is a basic boast:

Dueño, el talento que no tiene nombre ni tiene horizonte
Sueño, mi música no tiene cola ni ruido de pistola
Aparecerán los que hablen mal de mí, pero yo soy pa tí
Ellos jugarán con lo más sagrado que yo tenga, te lo querrán quitar...

Basically: my talent has no limit, my music doesn't need gun sounds (gangsta posturing), people gossip about me, want to take away what most matters (but they won't succeed).

Love the minimal but clearly merengue de calle beats against the bench, the lazy but on-time choruses. Guess his success is not all due to production, after all. Also love how savvy it is about using the on-the-fly, lo-tech uses of YouTube (he starts out, "Let's fix this video, which is turning into a piece of crap, and do something to send to YouTube."

While serving a sentence for allegedly beating his wife, Omega also played a concert. Not quite Johnny Cash in San Quentin, but still in the tradition of jail time serving as a boost to an outlaw image. This fueled rumors that the jail time was a publicity stunt. Who knows.

Omega served only a week of his three-month prison sentence and was released on RD$1M (about US $29,000) bail yesterday after his wife dropped the charges.

[Najayo concert pix via diario libre]

In praise of concón

I was thinking about rising prices of rice, cataclysmic food shortages, and the wisdom of peasant cultures while eating some Thai sticky rice this weekend.

I love sticky rice (and mochi and bibimbop) and other toothsome chewy rice-based treats because they all remind me of concón. This is literally the rice that gets stuck to the bottom of the pot.

Rather than being a culinary disaster, concón is a delicacy in the DR (In PR it is too, called pegao). To the point that some cooks purposefully cook rice so that it creates concón. (I've never quite gotten the hang of this, but I think it involves extra oil and extra fire toward the end of the cooking process.)

Like any hyper-local delicacy, there are rules:

1) It's easiest to make this in those possibly harmful aluminum round-bottomed pans commonly called calderos and available in hardware stores in Latin nabes. Do not try making it with your automatic rice cooker.

2) While it should have some color, it should not be burnt (golden to caramel, not black).

3) Texture-wise, it should be chewy to crispy, but should not threaten to chip your fillings (although some masochistic friends love just that, fighting the rice to submission).

3) It should be served separately, not mixed in with the regular rice. All the better to savor.

4) The more you can scrape from the pan in a single piece, the better. Hence why the picture below, of a pot-shaped piece of concón, is so impressive.

It makes sense that concón would also be loved in Haiti, and I know that for me the only proper bibimbop is one that has rice stuck to the bottom of the pot it's served in, but I wonder how many other rice-eating peoples love that crunchy sticky treat.

Anyone?

UPDATE: In Cuban = raspa. In Korean = nurungji. In Catalán = soccarat. In Farsi = tahdig. See, I knew it!

[concón pix via remolacha]

The other f'd up campaign for prez

We interrupt our regularly scheduled Friday video with a note on presidential elections that have been more tedious and annoying than the one in the U.S. Dominicans are voting today for prez, and you don't have to be a genius to guess that incumbent Leonel Fernandez will be re-elected.

At this time last year, the three major parties had spent RD$409M (about US$12M) -- by now, they've probably spent ten times that amount. Among the expenses? Ads with celebrity endorsers like Vin Diesel.

One of Leonel's big initiatives in this past term (aside from the metro for the misbegotten) has been making the DR a Hollywood-friendly location. He's taken a few trips to the Dream Factory with his wife to cozy up to movie execs, spending millions from the public till.

This "work," and the fact that a long list of celebs have getaways in Cap Cana and other tropical fortresses in the vicinity, has yielded a couple of shoots -- The Good Shepherd and Miami Vice.

Now where does the muscly ex-bouncer and living video game avatar fit into all this? According to a couple of reliable sources, Vin's bio-dad is some Dominican tiguere, and he spent some time there last year getting cozy with his padre patria. That may explain my unholy attraction to him.

Diesel ran some acting and directing classes last year (don't laugh), and has talked about opening up a film school there. (What Godardian or Almodovarian or Scorscesian insights into film Diesel might offer are still a bit of a mystery, but given the current quality of Dominican-made film, it can't possibly hurt).

All of this greased and facilitated by Hollywood-craving Leonel. So payback time came around, as it did for more unambiguously Dominican celebs like merengueros, bachateros & peloteros.

There's a series of 5 Diesel spots, with overlapping material. Most have amped-up behind-the-scenes action film footage and feature various versions of the following dialogue:

"Dominicanos, que tanto quiero, que lo bueno no cambia. Para mi gente, vota por Leonel, el presidente. Es p'alante que vamos" (the last is the campaign's slogan)

Not as cool as the Obama videos Gary Dauphin wrote about this week, but hey.

Listening to Vin, it appears he's just starting to learn Spanish, but already the tigueraje seems to be rubbing off.

Literary insularism: a wee rant

My post last week about the diasporic-phobic intellectuals in the DR prompted some intense responses, mostly by dominicanos here and mostly in private.

But island-based poet/editor Frank Báez wrote a longish, eloquent assessment in the comments section I share with you in translation below.

When Junot came to Santo Domingo to present “Drown,” not only did people think his book was garbage, but at the reading one guy stood up and offered to punch him.

That was more than 10 years ago. Since then, Dominican intellectuals strived to destroy the book and as the years went by and Junot did not publish a follow-up they put him down.

The funny thing is that all those people who destroyed him and made fun, people I imagine sticking pins into a Junot voodoo doll, are the same who weeks ago were photographed at his side in the home of the gringo ambassador and in the National Palace, celebrating his Pulitzer. “The first Dominican Pulitzer.”

The sad thing is none of these intellectuals have written about the book. Sad, but good for some, was also his visit to the Feria del Libro in 2006 when only a handful of people went. Since everyone dissed him, some of us were able to get to know him, speak to him and stay in touch. This led to his working with our magazine Ping Pong and the journal Hermano Cerdo.

My girlfriend tells me that of the people who went to the talk at this year’s Feria del Libro, an audience of more than 300 people, only a couple of students, no more than a dozen people, had copies of Drown or Wao with them. The people who introduced him and those who asked questions used a wikipedia entry as reference. They knew nothing of his work, and asked only the most general of questions, nothing related to the books. I think that says it all.

When we talk about Dominican literary intellectuals, we still only refer to people who are no longer qualified to make those judgments by the simple fact that they do not partake of a literary life. Meaning, they’re not publishing books that are interesting, or keeping an active, thoughtful life in the literary world and media. They’re people who only attend literary cocktails, who I call coctelistas.

Did I mention media? In Santo Domingo, we no longer see literary sections in newspapers. They’ve all been dismantled. Journals are nowhere to be seen. The only presence of Dominican writers is on the internet.

I think that instead of organizing meetings that are used for tourism (which is not bad in and of itself), it would be more fruitful to find a way for literary projects here and there to get to know each other. Let’s translate, and edit good books.

For example, we could do one called “La Isla Entera” (The Whole Island) where Dominicans from all places can write. Not just the ones on the island, but the ones in the U.S., in Spain, Holland, Argentina, etc. An anthology to pull all those folks together.

Title aside (which to me implies that it should include work from Haitian writers), I love this project. Anyone who wants to give me or Frank names of folks who should be in there can do so by emailing me via this site, or him at his site.

Junot in Dominilandia

I swear I don't have a Junot obsession, and that he doesn't pay me to promote him. But it's not every day a Dominican writer is top literary news in the U.S. When the next one (and the one after that) hits, I'll be there too.

I was curious about how he was received in the DR post-prize. Last week he was one of two featured guests (the other was Derek Walcott) at the Feria del Libro, the country's annual book fair.

When Drown came out and he visited the island, he was as roundly trashed as Julia Alvarez was, for the same stupid reasons those of us living in English are: we've been away too long, we write in English, we write about cultural references they don't get, we're not obsessed enough with Trujillo, and if we are, we get our facts wrong. Nuyoricans can chime in any time.

I wondered if the AngloAmerican literary establishment's seal of approval would change things.

Media reports like this one and this one mostly stuck to the facts: he was there, he was controversial, everyone wanted to kiss his ass. The Listin Diario gave more space to announcing he'd be attending a lunch with the U.S. ambassador than to anything he said. And he was named Literary Ambassador of the Dominican Republic. Um. Yeah. Whatever.

The pull-quote of choice was a good 'un: "Dominican racism prepared me quite well for dealing with racism in the U.S." He shared an anecdote about being kept out of a nice Dominican club a few years back for being too dark.

Other remarks that appeared in press accounts which I suspect hit DR audiences a little hard were his comment that when he hears late dictator lite Joaquín Balaguer called "the genius of the people," "I die laughing."

Film/video editor Harold Martinez was at the talk, and shared some quick comments (we'll update with a more thorough account once he sends it in). He said that for the Dominican literary and political establishment, Junot is "almost an alien" and that "many criollos are pissed because he's not, according to them, Dominican."

The book, the Pulitzer, the visit and the reaction to it in the DR, said Harold, "has just raised the bar in terms of how much we [are] separate from each other...The one's born and raised in the motherland, vs the one's raised in the united."

At the Dominican Studies Association conference last week, I think the same day that Junot spoke in the DR, CUNY trustee Hugo Morales suggested we have an encuentro between island-based writers and diaspora writers. In theory, it's a great idea, but in this world, I have no interest in such a meeting.

We in the diaspora have the vantage point that lets us see links across countries, past superceded rivalries, down to the rooted structure of common oppressions. And many of us have lost our patience with educating a puny intellectual bourgeoisie that sees us as desecho rather than the future.

An exchange like that Morales proposes already happened, in 2001, thanks to a Rockefeller grant secured by Prof. Silvio Torres-Saillant. While Dominican intellectuals were happy to travel to the US on the foundation dime, they did not support the U.S. folks when they traveled to the island. No, thanks.

On the other hand, I do have hopes for the younger generation. As I've noted here, they are not as rigid about distinguishing between aquí y allá, possibly because many of them have moved back and forth. Strengthening those ties would be a more fruitful project.

[Feria del Libro pix via El Nacional; Leonel/Balaguer pix via britannica.com]