Even with the rains, it's hot and muggy out there. So I've been listening to stuff I can bug out to. Big ups to Jace for turning me on to El Guincho (see the Fader piece he wrote on him), whose Canary Islands provenance it seems gives him a twisted perspective on rhythms. I dug this fan-made video to "Kalise." Simple FX. Basically a kaleidoscope lens. But matches the hypno-trippy fun vibe of the music.
He was supposed to perform today at a free South St. Seaport show, but seems like he's not coming. No news on his MySpace page. What happened?
Enough money and ink has been spent over that BatFlick, but now I get my say. I dug it. With some caveats.
Aside from the obvious, there is lots of interesting acting, especially when you superimpose previous roles on each actor.
Christian Bale is like Patrick Bateman had a final psychotic break into two people, the caddish yuppy and the self-righteous murdering maniac. Michael Caine is not just the stiff-upper-lip caretaker, but a cold-blooded colonial, like here (note the Burma story).
Morgan Freeman gets to play God again, but this time it's all-seeing God. A sort of "magical (technological) negro." Nestor Carbonell, in a smallish part as mayor Antonio Martinez Robert Garcia, is a combo of Richard Alpert and Antonio Villaraigosa.
Gary Oldman is oddly mild. No Sid, no Drexl Spivey, not even a little Count Dracula. But I guess with all the expressionistic performances, you need a little understatement for contrast. Maggie Gyllenhaal, alas, basically gets to be a moll, a touch of Secretary.
But there are lots of disturbing undercurrents in the movie. The Unapologetic Mexican makes a detailed and convincing case that the movie can be read as a justification of the War on Terror. I won't repeat the argument here, but it did hit a lot of points that nagged at me. Suffice it to say the movie has several actual ticking time bombs, torture (sans waterboarding) and Total Information Awareness.
The dizzying vertical vistas of Gotham and Hong Kong are really breathtaking, but in the latter, you have a clear extraordinary rendition. And what is up with Chinese becoming the villains du jour? Not just Fu Manchu stuff, but a sort of displacement of the 80s image of Japanese as financial yellow peril, a metastasized capitalism.
But I think, unlike TUM, that the movie doesn't entirely side with the righteousness of Batman's cause. The tragedy of the movie is how hard it is to not give in to fear, grief and desperation. I thought it was a meditation on the asymmetry of escalation (thanks, Chauncey) and how the powerful prefer to keep violence offstage, tip over into dehumanizing others at the slightest threat, how corruption is all about economic crisis.
To me, it doesn't just invoke post-9/11 NY and Iraq, but also Cauca, Zimbabwe, ICE raids and detentions, the Occupied Territories.
This really is a wee one, I promise. I'll be back to regular bloggery later this week -- been trying to catch up on real work -- but I just couldn't let pass my reaction to this NYT article about a CNN project airing this week on being "Black in America."
First, the headline: "CNN Trains a Lens on Race." This led me to think the article was about looking at, you know, race. But the lede dispelled that notion: "The notion that there is something called 'black America' is a subject of debate."
The idea of the series, that Obama's candidacy raises the question of to what extent things have improved for Blacks, is a good, important one. But please don't frame it as a "conversation about race." It's a conversation about Blacks and white guilt. Has nothing to do with the rest of us, or even with what could be the underlying social justice goal, dismantling white privilege and supremacy.
So here's my proposal. Can we have a moratorium on using "race" as a euphemism for African-Americans/Blacks?
Making all "race" conversations as something that only involves the Black-white spectrum leaves out the rest of us -- Brown, Yellow, Red, and those who don't even fit the color scheme. And demographics have already superceded this limited vision of American race.
The lead reporter on the series is Soledad O'Brien, a great journalist described in the piece as "biracial," with "a black mother from Cuba and a white father from Australia." Cheers on describing her heritage accurately, but why re-inscribe this Latina as yet another example of how Black & white are mixing in the U.S.?
Another one for the list: urban ≠ Black. No more "urban format" for radio (and for the love of Pete, no more "hurban" either). Urban environments are racially mixed, not "blackened."
Enjoy this lovely and cogent framing of the illegal immigration "debate" as really a convenient forgetting of how the U.S. was founded by another sort of immigrant -- settler colonialists -- who legitimized taking over lands from Natives via, paraphrasing Jared Diamond's formulation, guns, germs, and a ratified constitution that served Europeans' interests and ignored those of Natives, slaves and women.
I'll let you in on a little secret: I'm a lazy cultural critic. And an anti-snob to boot.
Because I really cannot listen/see/read pop culture 24/7, I fall behind on some pieces/performances/acts. And sometimes, when said pop cult point is hyped, I tend to turn away. This is why I didn't check Calle 13 for a long time, or MIA. Mea culpa.
My new latecomer act? Mexican Institute of Sound. I heard the description -- ironic Mexican electronica, à la Nortec Collective, made by a label rep -- and I thought, que Dios me libre from so much hipness.
But as Maegan Ortiz and I discussed extensively in a bathroom at the LAMC last week after her "Blogueando" panel, even in soundscapes that are now shaped so much online, there is a connection that can sometimes only be made sharing the same meatspace.
And Camilo Lara, Mr. MIS, was a much more convincing advertisement of himself in the flesh -- he too was on the bloggers panel -- than a thousand Filter raves.
Insightful, self- and others-deprecating, he imagined a near future in which bloggers become a new indie combo of A&R and producers, commissioning mixes, album-length projects and otherwise extending their roles as curators/tastemakers. "Blogs will be sub-labels, because they can generate music," he said.
On the owning-vs.-subscription debate, he said, "Entertainment is a more zen thing, no? You don't need to have anything. We live in such small spaces you don't have room to store 1,000 records. If you want to hear a crappy Gwen Stefani song, you can hear it and not keep it."
All of which sent me running to MySpace and my stack of promos (where IS my copy of Piñata? I could swear I got one), where Lara's goofy old-school lazy-rap vocals all of a sudden seemed charming rather than DF hipster pretentious, more Beck than Austin TV.
How can you not love a guy who writes a song about how breakups remap your city, because you avoid the places you went to with an ex? In the video below for "Katia, Tania, Paulina y la Kim," Camilo skates through DF's Natural History Museum with a tail attached, and concludes that
I no longer like to go out at night
because I remember my girlfriends in the car
all pretty and gorgeous, with one defect:
they no longer go out with me, instead they go out with a perfect guy.
Today was the James Brown auction at Christie's, which is expected to rake in some $2M total. There was a whole lotta stuff in the lots. The most unusual single-item sale was to Paul Schaeffer, who bought JB's MedicAlert bracelet (diabetic, allergic to penicillin) for $32,500.
One handwritten letter written on Delta in-flight stationery narrates the following brush-off to a sometime squeeze:
Hi sport, Darling, I'm suggesting that we make this trip our last one, not that I don't care, but it's not that you're not a beautiful girl girl, I hope our short relation got you on the goodfoot. I'm going to give you another six thousand so you won't have to go to work to quick but you'll be fine. I'll always be your friend, J To Princess D (underlines and strikeouts in original)
DAMN. This sold for $2,375.
Greg Tate, who's writing a JB bio, told me lots of funny JB stories earlier this week, including the one about the woman who jumped onstage and got naked, but none of the musicians could pay attention, bc Mr. Brown ran a dictatorship. "Onstage, you only looked at him," said the band man. Also, how at one point JB had a room built just for the suits he'd worn at the Apollo. Damn DAMN.
[pix of JB at 9 and Rust "Sex" jumpsuit via Christie's site]
I've always thought Crossover Dreams (1985) was one of the best Latin NY movies and one of my fave glimpses of the New York that was, the living, unslick city.
This story of a struggling salsa musician especially grabbed me with its low-key realism. This, and El Super (1979), are director León Ichaso's great movies. When he's returned time and again to the same milieu, with more money, he's screwed it up. (In a way, he's re-enacting the problem of his Crossover Dreams protagonist: how quickly one loses vision when money enters the picture).
But a musician/filmmaker friend had asked me to take another look, said that I had perhaps overvalued the movie. Was he right? Not sure. But I did notice some things I hadn't before.
If you have not seen the movie, check the synopsis here. Basically, it plays out the ol' art v. commerce, "ethnic" v. mainstream dilemma. The dialectic between "Latin" and "American" is too starkly drawn and really misreads what was happening in the New York Latin music scene in the late 70s and early 80s.
Our hero Rudy Veloz either sticks to the cuchifrito circuit, making $40 of crotch-sweaty money per gig, or he makes smooth jazz with a Latin "flava" (leave in the congas, sub in a sax for the trumpet). There is no other option, since the story is resolved when he "returns" to his roots.
Check this scene, in which Rudy's mentor Cheo Babalú (played by Virgilio Martí) tell him that the funky bass, Beatles melodies and calypso-ish guitar of his "crossover" song "es una mierda." He instead tells him to stick to songs like "Todos Vuelven," an unreconstructed guaguancó that is key to the plot, repeated three times in the narrative.
The song, which twice is performed just with voice and a clave (in the scene above, the claves are pencils) circumvents all the innovations that salsa groups were making, which you can see in all the scenes with Rudy's band, basically a variation of Manny Oquendo's Conjunto Libre, with Jerry and Andy González and Yomo Toro, among others.
Here's Rudy's second performance of it, as mourning:
I do love this scene for its vistas of East Harlem buildingscapes and birds. In Nuyorican lit/film/pop culture, the roof is the space of escape, of transcendence, of release. The acting, by Blades, Shawn Elliott's Orlando and a few other minor characters, keeps this ship from running aground.
I had forgotten that when Virgilio facilitates Rudy's contact with the "American" record producer from beyond the grave, that producer is shown as trafficking mostly in post-punk and new wave. In the scenes where you see his other acts and a club that must be a stand-in for Danceteria or the Mudd Club, I saw the potential for what could have been a really radical link. Where was the band that crossed post-punk and salsa?
The movie assumes that the uptown "Latin" space and the downtown "mainstream/white" space never cross, but I know that wasn't true. There were Latinos downtown -- in Danceteria, in the Mudd Club, at CBGBs, at the Pyramid Club, at Paradise Garage. Some glimpses of this are in Downtown 81, in Arnaldo Cruz Malave's book about Juanito Xtravaganza, in conversations I've had with people who lived it.
This coming Saturday, we can finally exhale, and then inhale the delicious scents of pupusas, huaraches, ceviche, chuzos and elotes at the Red Hook Ball Fields.
Late last week received an email message from Cesar Fuentes, rep for the vendors, which said that all the city-required hoops have been jumped, and that pending a Dept. of Health inspection this week, they are ready to go.
Upon our last compliance hurdle being met -that is, the vendors' food
trucks and carts passing DOHMH inspection next week- our affair can
finally open its season as early as the weekend of July 19th!!
While
we are almost certain that most vendors will be compliant & ready
to operate by July 19th, we have also set up a 'rain date' for the
weekend of July 26th in case the majority of our vendors are required
to further adjust their mobile food vending units to meet inspection
standards.
I chatted with Rafael Soler (of the Dominican-Salvadoran stand) this past weekend at Brooklyn Flea (where some of the vendors camped temporarily) and he said that he'd had to invest $28,000 in getting his "mobile food unit," aka el tró, up to code.
And note that the traditional start-up time for the vendors has been
Memorial Day. So this year, their season has been effectively cut in
half. Patronize, people!
UPDATE 7/16/08: As of yesterday, DOH did not pass 6 of the vendors' trucks; another 4 trucks and carts have yet to be inspected. But Fuentes said he is still confident they'll be able to open if not this weekend, then the 26th.
[Our lovely model Melanie holds yummy elote last year at the Ball Fields. Pix by moi]
Think back to junior-high civics. Constitutionally, the three basic requirements for U.S. president are: being a "natural-born citizen," being at least 35 years old and having lived in the U.S. at least 14 years.
This is the reason that, despite the Simpsons Movie, you won't be seeing a Schwarzenegger for Prez campaign anytime soon, though some have tried to work around it. According to this NYT article, there is some question over whether McCain qualifies as a "natural-born citizen."
I, on the other hand, have ample, incontrovertible proof that I was
born in El Barrio. As
for the age bit, sadly, I have reached that mark with a couple to spare.
Here's the point. McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936, when it was under U.S. control as an "unincorporated territory." A year later, Congress passed a law that granted U.S. citizenship to people born there, but Prof. Gabriel Chin at Univ. of Arizona says that doesn't meet a strict definition of "natural-born," which implies at the time of birth.
This is an unintended consequence of the U.S.'s desire to draw lines and parse out rights to leave out broad swaths of undesirables from citizenship while controlling their lands and resources. "Unincorporated territory" is the same status given to Puerto Rico in 1898, as well as to the Philippines, Guam, Cuba and other stategic targets, such as a set of uninhabited islands off the coast of Colombia with vast guano deposits that produced, literally, a shitload of cash.
The "Insular Cases" which Prof. Chin is using as the basis for his argument were used to disenfranchise Puerto Ricans (and Filipinos) by ruling that "unincorporated territories acquired by the United
States were not part of the nation for constitutional purposes."
In plain English: McCain was close, but no cigar when it comes to being "natural-born" as a U.S. citizen. The law that granted it to him may work retroactively, but does not meet the test, according to Prof. Chin. Of course, lots of folks say that it's a technicality and that as far as they're concerned, he qualifies.
Given how the cheapening of citizenship is so much the unnamed battleground in debates over immigration, national security and surveillance, it's telling to see for whom these definitions are enforced to the letter (i.e., the parents of U.S. citizens) and for whom they are bent (old-guard white male Republicans).
[Pix of Pres. Schwarzenegger via Simpsons Movie site; pix of John McCain, dad John Sidney McCain Jr. and granddad John Sidney McCain in Panama's Canal Zone from McCain presidential campaign, via NYT]
Ever since I heard it coming out of a tinny car stereo in Santo Domingo, I've been wanting to track down what some friends identified as "electro gagá," a techno variant of the traditional voudou-related music played in processions in Holy Week in rural areas of the DR (in Haiti, it's called rara).
Have yet to find a record, but in one of Wayne's posts last week, on the heels of a post about avant duo Miti Miti, he posted a video of a kid dancing "gagá." Just what I'd been looking for. Super-stripped sound, an electric guitar playing the fututo part, a clave the only percussion, modern yet hypnotic. There's several videos of kids and other folks "bailando gagá," all to the same song.
And then I found the Pachemán y Griselito video below, which seamlessly mixes hip hop, "mambo" and gagá visually as well as musically. The men in the carnival costumes look to me like guloyas from San Pedro de Macorís. Some of the people dancing in back of the singers are marching in a procession, as gagá is traditionally performed. And all the folks dressed in white (albeit short and skin-tight) reference the religious nature of the original music/dance. Although, what is up with the one singer's Gilligan outfit?
Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go So many friends raved about this. But I realized I get impatient with gothics. Must be the obligatory genteel reticence of it all.
Ed Park: Personal Days: A Novel A comedy of social manners for the cubicle age. Nicely plotted even when it dips into the absurd. But I could'a done without the tour-de-force punctuation-less email that ties all loose ends.
Hanif Kureishi: Something to Tell You: A Novel A bittersweet sequel of sorts to Buddha of Suburbia and Beautiful Launderette: What happened to all of us old brown punks now that we're middle aged.
