Sound Taste

Friday Sovietika

In the middle of my Miti Miti jag, I started going to see La Sovietika (named after a Dominican term for loose women) and came to the conclusion: tigueraje is back. Not that it ever went away.

The band's sound sometimes reminds me of those mid-80s post-punk dips into dance, reggae, soukous. And the lyrics? Well, the lyrics are perfectly earnest satire of Caribbean men's desire for women ("Diablo morena tú si que tá buena"), of the ridiculousness of rock/merengue/reggeatón dreams ("voy a hacerme un tatuaje que diga 'perdóname madre'"), of how being broke is no excuse for not having a good time.

And the stage presence is a cross between CBGB's mid-1980s hardcore matinee and Third World backyard rockero -- stretched-out t-shirts and scuffed-up sneakers. In other words, the Sovietikos are pure medalagananarios. And I mean that as a compliment.

They're playing tonight at 8 pm sharp at Trash Bar in Williamsburg. Check 'em out. It's cheap (open bar 8-9 pm), and I guarantee you will laugh and maybe dance a little.

Two disclaimers: 1) I've been friends with Robert on guitar and Jorge on bass for many years; 2) I am a sucker for tigueraje and experimentation.

NYRemezcla wrote a semi-swoony interview with the band in October (it doesn't hurt that Trash Bar, LS's most regular venue, is near the Remezcla offices). Whether they attract more attention (or want it) remains to be seen.

Is the band a goof? Is it a serious endeavor? To me, it doesn't entirely matter, as I love how it reminds me of the looser, more playful, more curious side of music and arts. Making the most of inadequate spaces, focusing on the vibe rather than the image.

Check the extremely amateur video below of "Yo Quisiera." In another show I saw, for this song lead singer Stallion dropped trou to show boxers with the words "Meet My Little Friend." Juvenile? Totally. Endearing? I thought so.

Yo Quisiera

Happy Birthday Johnny Pacheco!

The party happened last week, but today's the birthday of one Juan Pablo Pacheco, one of the major architects of classic Fania salsa.

It took me ages to realize Pacheco was Dominican (in so many ways salsa was popularly coded as Cuban-Puerto Rican). And to fully appreciate what an outlier he was.

Not only was his dad a bandleader for the Trujillo-sponsored (but nonetheless jamming) Orquesta Santa Cecilia, but he arrived in NY in the 1940s, before most other Dominican families, and his family integrated into a community of musicians in one of the Golden Eras of Latin music -- mambo!

The man is still performing!

A while ago, he talked about a memoir he was writing, one that would cover his formation and the incredible innovations in sound recording, stagecraft and image management that shaped some of the most enduring New York musical products of the century. I have yet to see any sign of the completed book, but it's one I'm dying to read.

In any case, here's a little taste of Pacheco at his prime, Fania All Stars in their African tour doing "En Orbita." Check how he conducts the band with his whole body, like a rumbero eliciting the drum beats with hips, feet and shoulders.

Feliz cumple, maestro!

[pix of Celia and Johnny via mog.com]

Thunderdome, Dallas edition

The Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome clip above is apropos of this Dallas Morning News story detailing the cage matches that were staged at South Oak Cliff High School over a period of a couple of years for students to "resolve their differences."

The school district site doesn't detail the school's racial makeup, and sorry, I'm not familiar enough with Dallas to know, but a wikipedia entry about the school mentions that "Between 1965 and 1970 the student body changed from nearly 100 percent white to almost 100 percent African-American."

The Dallas Morning News story has a sidebar that includes the relevant pages from the report that revealed how the "cage" and fights were set up by school personnel. The principal at the time, who is alleged to have at one point condoned/encouraged the fighting, at another point is alleged to have worked to stop the fighting, saying "I don't want any of that shit... I've killed with my bare hands."

While wrestling/ultimate fighting edges into very physical theater, extreme games like "The Running Man" and "Death Race" are seeming less fantastic by the minute. Especially with so many young men of color with few productive prospects.

Everything you always wanted to know about NY Dominicans (but were afraid to ask)

Not exactly.

But I am interested in following the conversation over at the NYT City Room blog with Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, author of A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950, a historical study of how Dominican identity is formed entre aquí y allá.

Given that Dominicans have been immigrating in significant numbers to NY for some four or five decades (depending on when you start counting), and that beyond-the-Census estimates of their presence in NY circle around 800,000 (one out of ten New Yorkers), it's really amazing how little non-Dominicans/non-Latinos still know about the basics of 1) Latino culture; 2) Latin American/Caribbean history; 3) basic NYC demographics.

A sampling of the questions asked:

Outside of the Lower East Side and East/Spanish Harlem are Dominicans concentrated in other parts of the City?

many Dominican women dress as though they believed that their bodies - and by extension, their sexuality - are all that they have to offer the world. Is this an accurate assessment, and, if so, what accounts for it?

Dominicans have changed completely the NY image. The are uneducated and no manners. Washington heights is a perfect example of what they are capable of. Where ever there’s a large population of Dominicans, Property values go down, the area becomes sort of ghetto like.

OK, these are the most annoying ones. Some of the other questions run a little deeper -- about brain drain migration to Miami, about government corruption, about the extent of a Dominican political lobby in the U.S. And of course, a question about Dominican hair styling.

If I put on my teaching hat, I have to say that there are no stupid questions. But why do we always have to explain the most basic stuff over and over and over again?

I don't envy Prof. Hoffnung-Garskof having to address these questions. Having done one of these for my book Nueva York, patience and focusing on constructive engagement is the name of the game.

In that spirit, I'd encourage y'all to post your own questions.

[Sorry. Can't remember where I got image of Marge Simpson with a Dominican blow-out]

UPDATE 3/18/09: First set of answers here. A basic primer on the origins of Dominican migration, a discussion on Dominican (and working-class immigrant) participation in higher education, and an outline on why newer immigrants do not fall predictably along the US Dem-Rep axis. I bet he's saving the Blackness question for the next installment.

Friday Arlenis

My interest in high fashion tends to begin and end with ANTM. Not a snob thing, just not my bag.

But the Fashionista pix and post of Arlenis Sosa (h/t to Giselle Rodríguez Cid) caught my eye. #1, she's got the mancha de plátano smack in the middle of that beautiful forehead (esp. when you see her more "natural" shots). #2, according to this NY Mag bio-chronology, her big assignments seem to be ones where she's figured as Black "African." (which, really, is just about the only way high fashion tends to see Black women anyway. Always back to Saartjie Baartman, in't?).

I am digging how African fashion (of Africa, by Africans, for Africans) has been getting more play on its own terms. Not that it means non-whites have any significant space on the catwalk, no matter what Vicki Woods says.

In the Models.com video here, Arlenis (her name alone is like a Quisqueya gang signal) represents Monte Cristi, far removed from the capital, bordering Haiti, as unlikely a place to grow supermodels as Siberia. I <3 the comments, where her cousins and assorted Dominicans pop up in all their untranslated beauty.

[Arlenis time via fashionista from Time Magazine]

17 Reasons Why: Gentrification isn't just a Black thing

I'm a little late on my review of Medicine for Melancholy, which I saw a few weeks ago at the Waverly IFC Center. I had some strong reactions, some of which were totally opposite to most of the reviews I've seen, even those by trusted astute writer friends like Ernest Hardy and Elisha Miranda.

I was excited to see the movie, a 24-hour romance between two Afro-bohos in my former home of San Francisco. There were superficial elements that reminded me of She's Gotta Have It (more on that movie, which I caught again recently after many many years, in a future post) -- the monochromatic palette, the quirky romance, the space for artsy Blackness to just breathe. But like most shorthand, the comparison doesn't hold too far.

First, the good: the sense of place, and the romance of place, comes through clearly. San Francisco is easy to fall for, the pretty girl at the party to whom everyone gravitates. But the beauty in the movie isn't just the usual postcard vistas, it's more the sweet alchemy of low-rise housing + hills that makes you feel apart and in nature in Potrero Hill, Dolores Park, the Palace of Fine Arts.

The movie pays careful attention to where people live, what they're likely to cross rolling from the Marina to the Tenderloin, the intimate little corners of the not-so-new-anymore Yerba Buena Arts Center, the industria-era nostalgia of the Britex Fabrics sign. I have a personal map of my own favorite Mission District signs: El Capitan (torn down), 500 Club (my beacon home biking down from the Haight), Thrift Town (17 Reasons Why).

Place is nostalgia, for a San Francisco that was less white, less uniformly rich. The figure we get from Micah (Wyatt Cenac, who turns in a great performance, tensed up in his laid-back-ness, always on the verge of breaking his Buster Keaton demeanor to laugh or rage) is 7% African-American population, with the stronghold being Bayview-Hunter Point -- the "redevelopment" of the Fillmore as the city's Black displacement original sin. All true, all a tragedy -- one that fits in nicely as evidence of The Plan (go 31:45 in for the relevant segment) -- but not the whole story.

As Micah and his paramour Jo wander the city and talktalktalk about race, romance and redevelopment, they pass by an open storefront where a group of people is discussing gentrification. I think these are played by real-life housing activists. What I noticed is that everyone talking about displacement from San Francisco to the East Bay and further inland was white. Huh?

The most intense displacement of the past decade has been in my former neighborhood of the Mission and like neighborhoods, traditionally Latino nabes. The Latino population of SF has remained more or less steady since 1990 (14% of the city even as total population has gone up and down). But those who remain are poorer and more marginalized. How do you talk about gentrification in San Francisco and have it be strictly a Black-white conversation?

And for that matter, how do you talk about "alternative culture" -- one of the other subjects of contention for our blipster protagonists -- and yet again frame it strictly in terms of Black-white? At one point, the couple hits a "Soul Night" in a club I could not place (Elbo Room?) where, retro-Daptones style, most of the revelers are figured as white.

But I spotted a few Chicano-Filipino-looking people in there. The notion that "alternative" only means "white" is a false one, at least to my memory of 1990s SF. Or maybe the polyracial omnisexual bohemia of my memories only exists in LA now.

And I haven't even talked about the straw-woman that is Jo, with her opaque life, contrarian non-politics and fuzzy personality. All we can gather about her is that she is the kept woman of a globe-trotting art dealer/curator. Her "creative side" and politics is restricted to making t-shirts sporting the names of female filmmakers. Um, yeah.

Micah's race warrior position can be compelling even against a tougher interlocutor than the one he gets. I couldn't figure out what Micah saw in Jo aside from cuteness and checkered Vans. It's almost like Micah is having an affair with the ideal of a Black alternative woman rather than a flesh-and-blood person.

I really wanted to like this movie. But as lovely as so much of it is, it left a sour taste in my mouth.

["Medicine for Melancholy" still via allmoviephoto.com; "17 Reasons Why" pix via thelab.org]

Re-orienting axes

In Mohsin Hamid's tight and compelling The Reluctant Fundamentalist, narrator Changez (the book isn't nearly as heavy-handed as the name suggests) reaches the point of no return in his alienation from the American imperialist dream (complete with high-power finance job and gringa girlfriend) in Valparaiso, Chile. He visits Pablo Neruda's home and finds a point of connection he's lost in post-9/11 New York:

...the home of Neruda did not feel as removed from Lahore as it actually was; geographically, of course, it was perhaps as remote a place as could be found on the planet, but in spirit it seemed only an imaginary caravan ride away from my city, or a sail by night down the Ravi and Indus.

To me, it's not just the "universal poetry" of Neruda or the mountain views from La Sebastiana that make it an apt place for Changez to have his epiphany. It's because he likely recognizes a setting where the connection between politics and everyday life is more direct and honest than in 2002 U.S., with naive "who me?" policies condemning some and secretly encouraging others. Latin Americans have long memories for that approach, and Chile especially so.

While the U.S. tries to mend relations in several parts of the world, Latin America is forgotten, except as a perennial source of slave cheap workers and scapegoats for current labor conditions. And in turn, Latin America is starting to think of the U.S. as a player among many, not the only game in town.

I thought about this when I saw the new Chinatown project in Santo Domingo, an indicator of the DR's deep interest in Chinese investment beyond the creation of free trade zones.

It also jumped out at me seeing a story about one of the most popular novelas in Brazil right now, Caminho das Indias, a caste-crossed lovers story with Brazilian actors speaking Portuguese but outfitted in saris and dropping Hindi. Partly filmed in Jaipur and Agra, it is a fantasia of an "exotic," "colorful" culture (pace O Clone/El Clon) and does stick to a lot of Orientalist clichés, but even the most realist novelas are high melodrama and require a broad brush, so I see it more as normalizing India as a source of power and glamour.

Check this matchmaking scene:

And last in my list of evidence of Global South nods to appeal to the Chinese-Indian economies is a literary magazine I was brought from Delhi called Vislumbres (after Octavio Paz's mostly annoying essays written during his time as Mexican ambassador to India in the 1960s).

Financed by the consulates in Spain and several Latin American countries, it's a gorgeous journal in red-black-white that vaguely recalls Soviet constructivist art. Trilingual (English-Spanish-Portuguese) it has work by Latin American writers about India and Indian subcontinent writers about Latin America. Some of the work is lovely impressionistic, some borders on mutual exoticism, but the effort was what fascinated me, the gesture to dialogue.