Insane or brilliant?
I'm just as excited as every geek out there about the opening of the new Star Trek movie tomorrow, but do I really want to smell like the Vulcan state of heat? Or the guy who never makes it to the end of the episode? At least naming a perfume after that virile alien-nailer makes geeky sexy sense.
"It's hard to believe I can be so moved by the touch of an alien hand."
Yesterday's NYT story about critical darling Roberto Bolaño possibly fictionalizing his heroin use cracked me up.
The guy writes about myths created around writers and conflicting perspectives on memories and events. And we are shocked, shocked that his alter ego on paper does not exactly correspond to the man in the flesh?
As Julio Ortega writes in an El País article the NYT cites, Bolaño "no había previsto que después de su muerte sería, en inglés, otro Bolaño, y tendría el papel espectacular de una nueva vida" (he had not foreseen that after his death he would be yet another Bolaño and would have a spectacular role in a new life).
It was an open secret for the last decade among those who read Spanish that Bolaño was the real deal. But not until he posthumously becomes a New Yorker favorite does he exist in the world literature market (because translations into English get refracted into other languages, and praise in US and UK literary gossip rags journals catches the attention of the English-reading elites everywhere).
This lack of imagination is one of the reasons the U.S. is still stuck using the "magical realism" paradigm to understand postmodern non-realist Latin American literature. And that even as critics and the public denounce all manner of memoirs discovered to be inaccurate or out-and-out invented, we demand more writing about "the real," a ticket to experience all the more marvelous for its too-good-to-be-true trajectory.
Did Bolaño, as he describes in the essay "Beach," quit heroin? Was he in Chile during the Allende coup and jailed, as he writes about in "Dance Card"? Personally, I don't care. I don't need a Romantic myth of the suffering dissipated artist to read his stuff. The writing is what it is -- riveting.
In the lit classes I've taught in the past couple of years (mostly Latino lit), I've been quite stunned at students' absolute embrace of the aesthetics of "realness." No matter how polished or stylized or elaborated the depictions of "street life," they judge these stories by how "true" they are to how they see their lives and the lives of those around them. Even though none of them really live in a 50 Cent video.
The absurd, fantasy, psychedelia, allegory, exaggeration, all these things they reject as "unreal" and therefore not worth their time, even though a lot play video games that are nothing if not all of the above.
I've been pondering a screed against "the real" in literature. Because the truth is that if the U.S. publishing industry is about to become extinct, no one buys books, or reads them (especially fiction), what obligation is there to playing by the rules? Why not exit the market system altogether (.pdfs as the new .mp3s), reject the distinction between the real and the imagined, write without thinking of what will sell? Maybe I am a Romantic after all.
[photo by MARCEL.LÍ SÀENZ via El País]
Can't say I have much to add to the avalanche of commentary on #44's inauguration yesterday (though I may have something to say later this week on the poem), but here are a few random images that amused me to no end:
A shot I snapped on the run of the wares of a perfume salesman on 34th St. and 7th Ave. (didn't have time to purchase a sample -- I wonder what hope smells like?).
There was a gigantic re-creation of the inauguration over at Legoland. Check the slideshow over at the Guardian UK. My favorite tableaus are the line of people waiting for the portapotties and 'Retha and her bosoms. (Photograph: Graham Whitby Boot/Allstar/Allstar)
Also check this and this awesome satellite photo of ants -- er, people -- at the National Mall either at 11 am yesterday or at 9 am (there's a lot of debate on using the Washington Monument as a sundial in the comments; h/t to io9).
And I was totally tickled by the clip below, posted yesterday by Afronerd on the WNYC news blog. God, how I miss Richard Pryor.
Sound Taste is still in hibernation mode, but if all goes as planned, will be emerging later this week, with a brand new bag to accessorize what, just about now, should be the new world we're living in. (Yes, in some ways the same ol' world, yet not.)
Playing in my head: Nina Simone, "Feeling Good"
[t-shirt graphic via Boing Boing]
Never mind the Black President, Dominicans are all into a Black Santa Claus this year.
According to a press release I received, the Dominican-made movie "Santi Cló: la Vaina de la Navidad" outsold "Quantum of Solace" for the week after its release Nov. 13.
Santa Claus body-slammed the Three Wise Men out of the Christmas gift-giving business a long time ago. But a Black Santa? That is progress.
Several Dominican pop movies that have come out in the past few years have had the potential to use comedy to look at interesting issues. Sanky Panky, the previous outing by this production team, was about young men who pimp themselves out to lonely tourist women (in other words, this was the funny take on the same themes in the great Heading South).
Alas, movies like Nueba Yol, Perico Ripiao and Sanky Panky always overwhelm interesting issues with overacting, overwrought conflicts and sappy resolutions. Nonetheless, I'll probably go see this when it's released in Washington Heights (or maybe I'll just take a trip uptown to see if the bootlegs are out yet, ho ho ho).
Meantime, here's the (too-long) trailer.
[Santi Cló & Bond face off image by Santiclodominicano via Flckr]
Saw an astonishing tidbit in a "Talk of the Town" piece in this week's New Yorker. Prince (yes, the Purple One) on occasion goes door-knocking in the vicinity of his Los Angeles home to proselytize with fellow Jehovah's Witnesses.
Makes me (almost) reconsider ignoring the buzzing on weekends. Who knows? I might run into Venus & Serena Williams, Jill Scott or Ja Rule.
[image of Prince via The New Yorker]
Amid lots of deadlines, taking a second to breathe.
Yesterday, I couldn't get Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come" out of my head. Today, it's the Jerry González invocation of the spirits, a thanks for a cleansing, an invitation. "Vamos pá la rumba, vamos pá la rumba, ya yo me curé, y me despojé."
Trying to hold the cynic back, just for a minute.
In the morning light, you exchange knowing smiles, small comments. "It's a good day." "Yes. It is."
Not like last night, walking with a contingent of black and brown people from East Harlem to 125th St. Fireworks. Taxis beeping. People poking heads out of public housing windows to wave. Random hugs. Lots and lots of screaming. Witnessing. Communing.
Nagging thoughts pipe up in small voices as I hear the victory speech: yes, he is echoing MLK's speech, but that means we're still in the same Civil Rights Era narrative. This morning: the media talk about "breaking racial barriers" as if now we're done with racism and the fight for social justice; it took so much energy to make a Black, biracial, child of immigrant, majority-minority-state raised, African-connected, Asian-connected, organizing-connected, education-connected man Mr. President, I am afraid the momentum will dissipate.
Do we know what to do next? The work is just starting.
[h/t to wayne&wax for the grafik]
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.