Sound Taste

Por fin! It's Election Day

Did you vote? Did you make sure someone else voted?

(Ignore the inappropriate accent on Presidente. h/t to Guanabee)

Two shows: (In)formed by Color and NeoHoodoo

Checked two art shows this weekend, one planned, one unplanned.

The one that had the most visceral impact was the unexpected one. Surprises always hit us harder. First Carlos Cruz-Diez's "Cromosaturación" here.

You approach a glowing room in the otherwise bland-ish gallery within the hoity-toity Americas Society on Park Avenue. You put on paper booties (expecting a hairnet and lab coat, too), walk past the sign that warns of disorientation and vertigo and step into a field of green.

Actually, the room is styrofoam-white, and has the same effect as a photographer's white backdrop, which when flooded with flash makes subjects look like they float in space. The green fluorescent light swells within the space, so that your skin is green, the very air is green.

Next to that is a space in red, and when you move into it, the shift is intense. The realities of the red universe are not the same as the green universe. You feel pulled by a different gravity, your blood a different density. Next room is blue, and the jerking sensation is the same.

It was impossible for us to photograph. Our puny cameras adjusted to "normalize" the color field and could not capture the psychedelic effect.

Simple stuff, but really effective in messing with your perception. Maybe there is something to the theory of auras and yoga commands to think in a color.

And at PS1, a show I'll talk about more soon, NeoHoodoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith. Springing from Ishmael Reed's "NeoHoodoo Manifesto" but really more about how the trauma of colonialism and slavery never quite kills subcutaneous knowledge of symbol and totem and ritual and acknowledgement of spirits and nature.

In the biggest hall, the pieces that had the most mojo (to my eyes): José Bedia's incantatory Las Cosas que me Arrastran (The Things that Drag Me Along), with the artist/shaman dragging with him/on him the spiritual charge of the African and the Native American, connected by the chains of the penitent, the pilgrim; Radcliffe Bailey's Storm at Sea, where a small Ogún in the corner haunts an ocean of wooden piano keys and a black black ship that will eventually doom his children; Sanford Biggers' Ghetto Bird Coat, needed camo for protection.

As one of the artists, Amalia Mesa-Bains said to me in an interview at the opening, it's a happy coincidence this show has opened now, when we need the refuge of spirituality most, to recharge for the change coming.

[Cromosaturación pix (not from Americas Society) by Jorge Mor@n 1 via Flickr; Bedia's Arrastran at PS1 by me]

Review: Calle 13 @ Nokia Theater

In short: Menos cafrería, más metales.

The new album may have fewer nasties, but on stage the Brothers 13 didn't really tune down the raunch that much. You still had immortal lines like "yo se que tu quieres chuparme las quenepas / aunque no sean de Ponce / no importa que no sean ni de oro, ni de plata, ni de bronce" (Suave); "Mujer tú eres toda una geometría / Tu tienes el pudín como me gusta / Estirao con estrías / como de repostería" (Cumbia de los aburridos); and, of course, the bad-taste classic, "Señorita intelectual, ya se que tienes / El área abdominal que va a explotar / Como fiesta patronal, que va a explotar / Como palestino..." (Atrevete te te!).

(My apologies to the non-Spanish readers. Suffice it to say, sexual innuendo involving tropical fruits, jiggly pudding and exploding bellies.)

Adding horns and reinforcing the beats -- drum kit, bateria, congas, timbales and tambora, often several going at once -- does stretch the sound in new directions. Though never fear, the theremin and melodica are still present. (Quiet Visitante often gets short shrift next to the vocal cafre charms of Residente, but he's what really has taken the band beyond a goof.)

The sonic soup now includes Balkan brass, heavier samba, batucadas, a dash of cumbia villera and some slips into the land of Two-Tone ska. All of a sudden, I flashed back to Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, circa "Matador" and "Rey Azúcar," when they found a similar sweet spot among the New Orleans-Miami-Kingston-Recife continuum.

The brothers are very intent on shaking off the "reggaetón" tag. Notably, Residente clarified that what they do is "música urbana." "Nosotros queremos ser los juglares del pueblo -- contar lo que pasa sexualmente, políticamente, religiosamente. Y eso es algo que se ha olvidado mucho en el género" (We want to be the people's bards -- talk about what happens sexually, politically, religiously. That's something that's been forgotten in the genre).

But the real secret weapon of Calle 13's current iteration is the sweet-voiced PG 13. Was she there before? Now she is definitely second voice and catching up fast. I even dare say, as much as I like the Tacoobs, that I prefer to hear her on "Nadie Como Tú." You can compare her performance here with the official video of the album version with Cafeta here.

[fuzzy Residente and PG 13 behind pink parasol by moi]

Who killed the (non-white, non-male) music critic?: a wee rant

Whining about how blogging killed the radio star, er, I mean the professional critic, is getting to be a tiresome sport.

Nonetheless, a panel called "Death of the Critic?: A Roundtable on the Future of Music Criticism in the Digital Age," hosted by my long-time colleague and friend Ann Powers at USC's Norman Lear Center a couple of weeks ago, caught my eye.

The panelists were mostly veteran writers attached to at least one print publication. As the more "credible" critics, they usually assess what those wacky kids are doing on the internets. I didn't get a gander at the talks, but I can guess that since it is no longer cool to trash blogs, someone must have followed the common-sense talking points below.

Is writing about art & pop on the internet better or worse than in print? There be good blogs and cringe-y blogs. Eventually, you only find time to read the former.

The amateur v. professional thing? Well, the hallowed writers of (rock) music criticism weren't really  inverted-pyramid professionals -- that was supposed to be the whole point of rock journalism. Hip hop writers were supposed to break the mold set by rock writers. Jazz writers, on the other hand, might as well be string theorists.

Is everyone writing about the same thing? Nope. Just as the mp3/MySpace revolution means more and more specific subscenes and more experimentation among some fans, the bloggyverse allows you to find someone writing about every genre and every scene.

Has the shrinking space and consumer report trending of criticism in mainstream (and even alternative) print outlets pushed a lot of longer-form, more idiosyncratic writing to the web? Duh.

Now, this discussion rarely mentions race or gender. Because the market and media pressures are all supposed to affect us the same. But they don't.

Ernest Hardy's talk at the panel hit a lot of my sore spots. He minces not:

It’s as though Pitchfork fucked Vice and now their smug, smarmy progeny are building new plantations atop the rapidly eroding topsoil of access and cultural power.

He calls blogs kept by veteran writers and other passionate writers "slave shacks" where "the music and the criticism are still jumping."

And he hits the entrenched institutional issues in the head. It's not just the economy, stupid, it's about who is doing the choosing, who editors picture as either the knowledgeable or versatile writer when it comes time to assign (which of course, creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: writers who are assigned different stories in different outlets look more "reliable" to yet more editors).

And remember, as more newspapers simply pick up a lot of material from wire services, syndicated and parent chains, it disproportionately amplifies the influence of those people with steady critic gigs.

Ernest writes:

the real problem, much like with the Republican Party, isn’t just the low and shrinking number of people of color; it’s in the mindset that makes the erasure of some and the elevation of others so reflexive and natural as to go barely noticed or commented upon except by those being squeezed out, and their voices are very easily dismissed, their perspectives are undervalued in the first place.

In other words, the black & brown (and female) who bitch about not getting assignments -- despite having decades of experience -- are just bitter race/gender warriors. Of course, no one will say it. Because it would hurt to call our colleagues/bosses racist or sexist.

It's all very complicated, the same sort of pipeline issues you see in a lot of fields (journalism, academia, arts, science).

Class issues aside, it is still more likely that women and non-whites have to think hard about entering careers that require long apprenticeships and rarely deliver work that pays well steadily. Even for those of us who develop the ambition and learn the career path, we are less likely to have support networks and access to resources that allow us to make it through. And are more likely to be knocked off track by life issues -- family, health.

When I was a teen, my dream job was to write at the Village Voice. I never had the nerve to push my way onto an internship there (nor could I afford to work for free). When I did start working for an alt weekly after college (SF Weekly; Ann was my first editor there), I lost momentum after a few years for a lot of reasons -- I was still insecure about my talents, I got sucked into graduate school, I got tired of writing the same "Latin rock" story and did not know where to go next.

My music & arts criticism career has been start-and-stop through the past twenty years. Because I've had too many interests, because pitching is exhausting, because I get distracted by the need to pay the mortgage, because I've wondered if I didn't have better things to do.

And I can't say I have it figured out yet. But my own story aside, I am shocked at just how few women and brown/black people are out there. Ann is by far the most recognizable female pop music critic, because she has maintained a presence in major outlets (Spin, Village Voice, NY Times, LA Times). But for the average reader of writing about music, naming five other prominent women music critics takes some work.

There are a handful of Black music critics in major outlets (oh Kelefah Sanneh, how I miss you!). And I am glad for the return of Danyel Smith to Vibe. But now that Ramiro Burr is out at the San Antonio Express, I dare anyone out there to name a Latino music critic whose work you regularly read (Leila Cobo at Billboard is more like a business reporter in my book). Raquel Rivera is up-and-coming, but people only think of her when it comes to reggaetón, a "minor" genre. Oliver Wang or Jeff Chang aside, Asians aren't even on the map.

Want another marker of how crazy this all is, and proof of Ernest's point that we have in fact devolved? Check the TOC of the just-released "Best Music Writing 2008." Out of 32 essays, I count 3 5 women (sorry for the mistake, Daphne!), and maybe 3-4 nonwhites (sorry, there's about a dozen folks here I can't identify racially for sure). The also-ran list, which Idolator ran in four parts, does a wee bit better.

On yesterday's Soundcheck, Nelson George avoided the racial tally altogether, chanting the "quality" mantra. Which is legitimate, but the question is, how did the "quality" pool get to have so few writers who are not whiteboy music geeks? (This last said descriptively -- I have loved too many whiteboy music geeks, in print, in friendship and more).

The 2007 edition did a little better gender-wise, as did the 2006 edition, edited by Mary Gaitskill (?!) and Daphne Carr. Color-wise? A drop better too.

So we plug away, look to own our presses (or blogspots, or typepads or wordpresses). There's nothing else to do.

Monday Oscar D'León

So many things to love about this vintage mid-1970s video of Oscar de León performing Beny More's "Mata Siguaraya."

This performance falls well within my argument that U.S. critics completely misread salsa as retro, a return to tradition, when it was more a move in two directions at once -- into the past for some repertoire, for individual musical skills (the drums, the drums), and into the future with the stagecraft, the arrangements, absorbing the funk lessons of everyone's choreographer James Brown and the rock excess of Jimi or The Who.

Watch the hypnotic swinging fringe, which recalls vintage Tina, the "modern" (electric) but "traditional" (stand-up) bass, the early "cadenú"/bling aesthetic (the better to see the shine in the back of the arena), the "voz de vieja" chorus, the drawn-out scatting verses, trombone- and trumpet-driven montuno superimposed with those crazy moves (again, for the benefit of the back of the room).

Thanks to Xuxi for the link.

Sarah Palin as Welfare Queen

Political satire is something best handled by experts.

Rather than make my own sad attempts at it, let me just point you to the hilarious post over at We Are Respectable Negroes which manages to link the doomsday predictions related to the activation of the Large Hadron Collider, Superman Comics' Bizarro Universe and how every single thing that makes Sarah Palin unfit for higher office has been twisted into an asset.

(Please note that the use of blackface for Sarah Palin falls well within the guidelines laid out by Gary Dauphin in this handy chart.)

Worse, McCain has gotten a clear bump in the polls since the 'cuda joined the ticket. I still think the really racist voters are over-reporting their willingness to vote for Obama and that a whole lotta women cannot really be so stupid.

[Sarah Palin image via We Are Respectable Negroes]

Friday Calle 13

OK, so I'm slightly obsessed with the Brothers 13. Wanna make something of it?

The new record, "Los de atrás vienen conmigo," drops Oct. 7. In the meantime, the group (with a more prominent role played by hermanita PG 13) previewed a couple of songs at MTV Tr3s' 2008 VMA Pre-Party.

"Fiesta de Locos" laces in a bit of Balkan brass into the usual mix. Pretty seamless, too. "Esto no es reggaetón / Pero como quiera bailas un montón / Si no te gusta esta canción / entonces tírate por un balcón / Calle 13 viene sin lubricación"

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Review: Paul Beatty's Slumberland

High literary seriousness is easy. Satire is hard.

Several of the great nonwhite literary hopes for American literature have managed the balancing act, imploding the cage of identity politics, telling good yarns about deadly serious stuff, and otherwise creating a Big Bang that expanded the universe of which of our stories were "publishable."

About 10 years ago, the names of some of these writers would be invoked in tandem: Sherman Alexie, Junot Diaz, and Paul Beatty.

Alexie has been consistently productive, with eight books in a decade and a half. If you read this blog, you've already read plenty about Diaz's "don't call it a comeback" of last year. But Beatty? After the great White Boy Shuffle and Tuff, the only sign of writerly life had been an edited collection of African-American humor, Hokum.

And now Slumberland. The best he's ever done. This is what satire is supposed to look like. No target is safe: bling-blinging beat cannibal rappers, Europeans who fetishize African American culture, DJ geekdom, suburban disillusionment, the plight of Afro-Germans, Ken Burns, Wynton Marsalis.

And this is one of the best music novels I've read in quite a while, capturing music obsessiveness the way High Fidelity and Hopscotch do, bohemian living the way The Gangster of Love does. With great psychedelic descriptions of music, of beats and melody and of the in-time, out-of-time transcendental relation between great music and the listener. Aside from historical works like Love Saves the Day, I haven't seen a better explanation of the magic of DJing.

Ferguson Sowell, aka DJ Darky, is searching for the perfect beat. And he thinks he almost has it, if he can just add in the sonic umami of the Schwa, aka Charles Stone, a lost bebop-era jazzman. He follows clues -- such as a chicken-fetish porn video -- to just-before-reunification Berlin, where he becomes a "jukebox sommelier" (such a job exists, almost: check the curated jukeboxes of every cool Brooklyn bar).

Sample of Beatty's unrelenting cleverness: Stone is called the Schwa because "his sound, like the indeterminate vowel, is unstressed, upside-down, and backward."

Ferguson says he has a phonographic memory, and recalls and can identify all sounds he's been exposed to. Like Jean Baptiste Grenouille in Perfume, he's a connoisseur. The sound of his mother turning pages of the New Yorker in the 1970s is his Rosebud:

Those pages had an intellectual and textual heft to them. They felt like parchment, a parchment that no family ever had the temerity to throw away. Ma would turn through the Bellow and the pages rustled as though the story had been printed on numbered autumn leaves. I decided that if I could collapse all my memories into one sound, it would be the sound of those pages turning. Crisp. Mordant. Pipe-smoke urbane.

If the middle-class LA upbringing, the quest for release from the straijacket of race and for artistic fulfillment sound familiar, yes, the plot and several of the references share the arc of Passing Strange. Coincidentally, I ran into Stew this weekend on a Park Slope sidewalk, and he said the Slumberland bar really exists, and is a few blocks from his Berlin home. And that, yes, he's heard he should read the book, and now will, on my hearty recommendation.

Funny how the colored person in Berlin trope has become of late so ubiquitous. Berlin is the new Paris, it seems, for liberation from American racism. Not just for Blacks, either. Though he doesn't write about Germany, to me Abraham Rodriguez's South by South Bronx is as much suffused in his current Berlin home as in his former Bronx environs.

But back to Beatty. Even with a couple of anachronisms, which I'm always quicker to forgive in comedy than in drama (effect reigns supreme in the funny, I think), there is so much in Slumberland that evokes the late 80s and a certain political moment, the ways many of us felt released at last from the legacy of the 1960s even as we respected what was worth keeping.

And it also plays out, quite convincingly, the moment when away from home we find a new home, where we've become the self we dreamed about in our childhood rooms.

Batman is Cheney?

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.

"Race" ≠ Black: a wee rant

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."