Sound Taste

Review: Zeros @ Southpaw

"Hello, we're the Zeros from Chula Vista."

Called the "Mexican Ramones" though they developed parallel to the Forest Hills foursome, the Zeros were one of the wellsprings of American punk. Rock revisionism disguising a loving traditionalism (like the Ramones, the Zeros were acolytes of the affect of girl groups and the derangement of surf psychedelia), they played punk as attitude and approach, not style.

When I first came across the band, it just confirmed my suspicion that punk somehow expressed the Latin condition. After all, the first time I came across a record by my fellow Queens misfits in torn jeans I pronounced their name "Rah-MOH-ness."

I never saw the Zeros in its heyday -- the band was broken up by 1980 and I had little clue of punk history outside NY until I lived out West -- and age-wise, most of 50-60 people at Southpaw couldn't have either.

There were a lot of canas on us bopping to "Don't Push Me Around," but not all of us were paunchy middle-aged punks. There was a gaggle of shellac'd garage mods, their shags, striped shirts and pointy Beatle boots the same I remember in Cavestomp in the 80s. There were also a few cholo-billies barely old enough to get in the club, too sweet in their bangs and skinny black vest. And of course the usual Brooklyn crew of gringos on cool safari.

And on the stage, four men in black pushing 50 playing teen rebellion music, songs they'd written in high school. Was it ridiculous? Actually, no. I think sometimes it takes the accommodations and disappointments of adulthood to really appreciate the bustout energy of youth.

Individually, the Zeros have remained active as musicians. Javier Escovedo (brother to Alejandro and a uncle to Sheila E.) has been in True Believers and Rank and File. Hector Peñalosa played in paisley underground band Flying Color in the 80s. And Robert Lopez is, of course, El Vez.

On stage, Javier had a little of the lineless yet hard living look of Johnny Cash, but seems to miss his role as lead singer just a little too much. He indulged in ax god clichés -- two or three times stepping to the lip of the stage and grinding on the guitar, all the better positioned for photo-snapping fans.

Robert, on the other hand, treated the whole affair like a serious goof. His trademark pencil-thin mustache, black suit, crisp white shirt and roach killer shoes giving him the look of a 50s Mexican movie star, he spent much of the show with an impish grin on his face, tossing out disarming patter that on a teen would have been amateurish, but he wore with grace.

"I've run out of things to say," he said around song #4. And in a shoutout to Mario Escovedo, Javier's younger brother and the concessioneer in back, Lopez said he "saw us practice in Javier's bedroom when he was 12. That's not true, Javier was never 12, he is... ageless."

As is the rush of the electric guitar.

[blurry photos by moi]

Friday Led Zep

Because that's where I'm headed.

Thursday Influenza

Couldn't wait till Friday to share these influenza porcina-themed songs. The disease, panic and conspiracy theories are spreading quick as a sneeze, and so are related songs. God bless Mexicans' dark humor.

The video for "la cumbia de la influenza" by DF's Agrupación Cariño came out last Friday. Sample lyrics: "más vale suicidarse con taquitos de pastor" (better to commit suicide eating tacos al pastor) and "todos estaremos muertos cuando llegue Indiana Jones" (we'll all be dead by the time Indiana Jones arrives).

Jace and Wayne were all over it:

The cumbia was not only first, but it was the catchiest of the lot, and has inspired the most videos. One here, with taste disclaimer and bits of public health info projected throughout:

A techno cumbia, heavier on the tuba-like synths:

Bandaloz, a Duranguense band, was not too far behind:

A sweet acoustic rocker, set to the tune of the Cure's "Monday I'm in Love" (or as Andrés dubbed it, "Friday, I sneeze"):

A sloppy punky corrido, with a chorus reminiscent of Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" (English subtitles included):

And a reggaetón/dancehall numbah, with some weird arab references:

UPDATE: You saw it here first, but you can also hear me talking about these videos and these songs in a segment that aired on WNYC on Sunday, and this post mentioned in a Cinco-de-Mayo related roundup of music videos on the Nat Geo Music site.

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.

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]

Holy pochos, Batman!

I'm a sucker for pastiche. The piece below by Río Yañez (who I remember as a little kid running around Mission District artists' parties) unites two icons, Batman & el Aztec Hi-Tech Border Brujo hisself, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who as he gets older is starting to remind me more and more of a Mission street character of the 90s known as The Red Man.

And speaking of pochos, there is a bit of a kerfuffle about whether Drew Friedman ripped off Lalo Alcaraz for his recent New Yorker cover. Several folks on the West Coast are convinced he did. I'm not so sure.

Obama's image has been endlessly remixed with several obvious icons: MLK, Malcolm X, Abraham Lincoln. George Washington I don't think is such a stretch. But the publication of Lalo's image predates Friedman's, and personally, I like it better -- it evokes the unfinished Gilbert Stuart painting as opposed to what most closely resembles a dollar bill. What do you think?

Friday Gael

How did I miss this? Two of my favorite tastes that taste great together -- accordions and Gael García Bernal (h/t to NYRemezcla). This is a pitch-perfect norteño video related to the movie Rudo y Cursi, with that lovely Mexiwood power couple, Gael & Diego Luna. The melody shouldn't be too hard to recognize, even for the Spanish-impaired. I'm just disappointed that, while it seems it is indeed Gael singing, he is clearly not playing the accordion.

Way-off analysis of the gays and the browns: a wee rant

Amid all the good news last week, there was the nasty bit about the passing of Cali's Prop. 8.

Anyone who doubts that we are living in times of great change should look not just to the beautiful symbol of a Black Man as the "leader of the Free World," but to the return of the repressed, the utter fear represented by anti-brown attacks like this one, the trope of women as lobotomized beings who need products wrapped in pink, and the meme blaming "homophobic" African Americans in California for the passage of Prop. 8.

Check Ernest Hardy's long post taking apart a Dan Savage screed against African-American voters. The post leans a lot on the basic numerical analysis Shanikka made of all the assumptions necessary for the "Blacks hate gays" theory to hold up. In short, even if every Black voter who went to the polls voted to pass Prop. 8, it wouldn't've.

Latinos, as always, were assigned a secondary role in the brown anti-gay narrative. No one has bothered to get numbers to either blame or exonerate Latino voters. However, Andrés Duque wrote a bit about the belated and tonally off "No on 8" campaigns directed at Hispanics. The pull quote is this: 

Which brings us back to quote from The Advocate. Statements that the campaign only sought to create a Spanish language campaign late in the game (as they "revamped" the message) and assurances that it "seems" to be touching people betray the fact that they should have known for a long time that minority communities should have been included in the game plan long before now.

For me, a big part of the problem is that people in charge -- policymakers, ad marketers, MSM reps -- are, for the most part, still uneducated in street-level relations between people and groups, in the nuances of how people see each other, relate to each other, and form families with each other. Why else would we still have to explain that some Latinos are Black or that not all gays are white?

As I talked about in one of my recent wee rants on the continued whitening of media, things are only getting worse. Note Daniel Hernández's comments on the massive bloodletting layoffs at the LA Times, which disproportionately affected writers and editors of color and people who were, not coincidentally, I think, trying to figure out the new social configurations of California.

And can I throw in the controversy over Time Out Magazine's New York 40, profiling city arts and culture "influentials," which included a grand total of two-and-half people of color and a handful of women? Even in their apology, the editors seemed peeved that they, of all people, should get called out as racist. It's the old "merit" argument, discounting the possibility that what matters in the cultural lifeblood of the city is not just the Met, but The Point.

Getting all ranty in here is not just about crapping on institutions, I promise. At a time when I think we all still feel an opening, a crack of the cosmic egg, I want us -- yes, dear reader, you and me -- to start thinking of ways to teach, to create, to raise up a people who are willing to speak to each other, be neighborly, work together to improve their communities for everyone who lives in them.

There's a protest at 6:30 pm today at the Mormon Temple at Columbus and 65th St.

[Photo of Miss Claudia at 2005 Queens Pride parade by Joel Cairo/Newsday via amny; pix of LA Prop. 8 protest via welt.de; image of "New York 40" via Time Out Magazine]

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)

Mars Volta review redux

Lesson learned: if a band doesn't have an opening act, it doesn't matter if they play shaggy distortion-filled sprawling pieces. They will go on early and finish before 11.

Which is to say, a late meeting and overconfident timing meant I only caught three songs in Mars Volta's 2-hour set last night at Hammerstein.

But what I heard of the packed show was great. Singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala pranced around in the best tradition of skinny rock dandies channeling JB's ecstatic dancing -- Robert Plant, Wayne Kramer and, yup, Beck.

I've concluded the real secret of the band -- beyond the wig-out craziness, the tight integration of all their influences -- is the booming rhythm section. Drummer Thomas Pridgen and Juan Alderete on bass ground the wild sparks of the fuzzing guitars.

This I think is why they overcome the iron-clad rule about prog rock: girls don't like it. Even more than other very macho forms -- metal, hardcore punk -- prog just doesn't translate to female ears. But these guys have a healthy female fan base.

Not to mention a big brown following. Saw more brown-black people than I'd seen at a rock show short of Morrissey. It was cool to see the Mexican flags draped over the band's speakers, the Puerto Rican flags in the audience, without nationalistic shout-outs (the mancha de plátano was just there, for those who wanted to see it).

[photo by jbeauchamp via Flickr]