Been going to a lot of art shows of late, and am simultaneously reminded of how much I love art and how much of it is a mountain of caca.
"Ask Chuleta," an occasional video project by Boogie Rican artista and curator Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, skewers and invokes identity politics, postmodernism, "post-black," art world snootiness, the "white box community," and the continuing exclusion of working class nonwhites from galleries, as audiences, artists, and critics. "I want to bridge the gap between the art world and people like us."
Our gangsta art critic, with hoop earrings big enough for a lion to jump through, defines the prefix "post-" in relation to the NY Post, eating pegao is given as an example for a subject for identity politics art, and the rejection thereof is rendered as "retro" -- "it's kinda like retro clothes, like the way the 80s style is in now..." -- and the return of minimalism:
"Google Donald Judd, and you'll know what I'm talking about."
More recently, Chuleta recommended the show "Bangin'" -- "kid, the show's called 'Bangin'!" -- which just opened at one of my favorite Bronx white box galleries, Longwood Arts. (Alas, the video is only available through Facebook, as far as I can tell)
With a blurb from Calle 13's Residente, a portfolio of works by Miguel Luciano (recently a Paris sensation), a DJ'd book party and a hyped after-party, the Reggaetón anthology is far from your average academic tome.
But beyond the multimedia bells and whistles, the book is truly a watershed moment for the musical genre, for Latino cultural criticism, and for 21st C academia (Full disclosure: I am friends with two of the editors, and have a deep admiration and occasional email convos with the third).
The fat (1" thick, 370 pp.) volume doesn't just go the standard sociological-ethnomusicological route, but includes musicians' own accounts of how the music developed -- interviews with El General and Tego Calderón were illuminating -- and a look at the genre from the perspectives of dance, visual representation, gender and politics.
You may not like reggaetón (but I bet you move just a little if it comes on when you're on the dance floor), but after this, it'll be just a little harder to dismiss it as "racketón," as Juan Flores recounts one of his friends doing.
Check the book release tonight at 6:30 pm at Hunter College. Details here. FREE afterparty coordinates here.
[cover image with Miguel Luciano's Plátano Pride via wayneandwax]
The Hungarian lunch lady at school was shocked after hearing a radio report on Vieques. "How could the U.S. have Puerto Rico as a colony for 110 years? How is it that people don't know?"
All day today, NYU is screening movies from the closest thing the island has ever had to a film studio, the DIVEDCO (División de la Educación de la Comunidad), a New Deal-spawned Puerto Rican government agency that produced posters, films, festivals and other multimedia materials to educate rural populations about civic engagement, health and community development.
Like the WPA, because the DIVEDCO had incredible artists working for them, the project produced some aesthetically stunning stuff. I'm more familiar with the posters produced than with the films, which toe that line between documentary and melodrama familiar from Italian neorealism. Beautiful stuff.
Samples of the incredible silkscreen posters here (skip the intro). And should you ever be inside the Hunter College library, they have lots of DIVEDCO posters hung in the stacks.
Below is a trailer from "El Tiempo," a short which revisits the sites and players from the Jack Delano-directed "Los Peloteros" 50 years later. Beautiful use of split-screen to show how much and how little has changed in towns like Comerío.
No fooling, today is the start of National Poetry Month. Me, I think we need poetry 24/7/365.
Siddhartha Mitter's radio piece today about Yusef Komunyakaa made me think of one of my favorite poets whose work was also deeply shaped by the Vietnam War: Pedro Pietri, the Lower East Side's holy fool.
You can hear him here and here. And thinking about archives, I pulled up an old issue of The Portable Lower East Side, a long-gone and very missed magazine from the 1980s, and found this:
Rumors about Blank Walls and World War (excerpt)
I swear to god the english I speak Was learned in a week late at night I write in perfect Spanish BUT SINCE The typewriter was manufcatured in The U.S.A. it never comes out that way So don't get on my case or try to erase My poetry off the face of the earth Because on my birth certificate it says I wasn't born here or there or anywhere Within walking distance from times square Location of United Nations wet dreams And it seems there is a romance going on Between the living & the dead are ahead!
It was really too much cheap alcohol That ended the dinosaurs career in show Business during the silent movie generation At war with every country but Skid Road To keep the General Public's mind off para Psychology--the only subject I didn't fail In elementary school where they teach you The price of rice in Afghanistan and beans In Alaska & snowSuits in tropical psycho wards! This can be true or false or false & true It has nothing at al to do with history OR Hypnosis--If your liver doesn't like you Drinking water can also give you cirrhosis!
*** Pull out your favorite poet and read some out loud. It'll make your day better, I promise.
Juan Flores, still one of the few people to write about the ecstatic utopian music form called bugalú/Latin boogaloo, reconstructs a conversation between Jimmy Sabater and Joe Cuba before the first time the band played "Bang Bang" at a "Black" dance at the club that would become the Cheetah:
"It was a black dance, the morenos, morenos americanos de Harlem and stuff, you know, they had black dances one night a week there and at some of the other spots. So that night we were playing selections from our new album We Must Be Doing Something Right that had just come out, the one with 'El Pito' on it, you know, 'I'll Never Go Back to Georgia, I'll Never Go Back...' The place was packed, but when we were playing all those mambos and cha chas, nobody was dancing. So at the end of the first set, I went over to Joe Cuba and said, look, Sonny (that's his nickname), I have an idea for a tune that I think might get them up. And Joe says, no, no, no, we got to keep on playing the charts from the new album. Then toward the end of the second set, I went on begging him, and said, look, if I'm wrong, we'll stop and I'll buy you a double. so finally he said o.k., and I went over to the piano, and told Nick Jimenez, play this... Before I even got back to the timbal, the people were out on the floor, going, 'bi-bi hah! bi-bi hah!' I mean mobbed."
I have a special love for bugalú, born the same year I was, 1966. The songs are not as melodically or rhythmically sophisticated as salsa or soul, but they cook! They always sound like you've walked into the middle of a party -- a really great party. As much a dance as a song, it's infectious; passive listening is near impossible.
Joe's band, the Joe Cuba Sextet, was radical, stripping down the lush mambo orchestra to conga, timbal, piano, vibraphone and bass, where even the melodic instruments have a share in carrying the beat, the beat, the beat. And the vocals, erupting from every corner, "corn bread, hog maw and chitlins" "cuchifritos, lechón, lechón, lechón." Cheo Feliciano soneando. Heaven.
UPDATE: Joe Cuba will be viewed at the R&G Ortiz Funeral Home located at
204 E. 116th Street, NYC 10029 between 3rd & 2nd Avenues.
212.722.3512 on Wednesday & Thursday, February 18th & 19th from
2 to 10 p.m.
A funeral mass service will be held Friday
morning at 11 a.m. at St. Paul's Church located @ 213 E. 117th Street,
between Park & Lexington.
Rita Indiana could easily be the Dominican Grace Jones.
In "Encendía" she makes herself seem even taller and more angular skulking around in a cemetery (I hear she's like 6'4"). I'd been waiting for a video to go with the funny weird wild Miti Miti record Altar Espandex, which was released a couple of months ago and I've been meaning to write about. (Coming soon, I promise.)
"Encendía" the song is electrogagá plus minimalist merengue mambo horns, nonsense cutup lyrics that remind me a little of Josefina Báez and a lot of Las Chicas del Can. The video is all Afro-Catholic hyperbole (Joan of Arc/Anima Sola images plus all the voudou that fits, possession included).
Hearing the rooted Puerto Rican and Cuban songs recorded by this cult band in the mid-70s in these two releases, the folklórico part was clear. But seeing the experimental took a little more thought.
But if there was any doubt that the band looked forward as much as backward, you only had to hear the rendition of "Perdón" toward the end of the second set at Hostos.
Jerry González, likely the heppest cat left in all of Latin musicdom, steps to the mike with his trumpet (up to then he'd been on percussion only). The rest of the band watches and waits. Through the mute, the notes are clear as a knife edge, unhurried. All the lessons of bop mellowed but still biting.
He steps away from the mike, fidgets, moves over to another mike, but clearly in control of time and space, molding it with an insinuating melody that remains intelligible even as it's unspun and reconstituted at the molecular level.
We all hold our breath. Brother Andy, Jerry's oldest collaborator and leader of the band, watches too. Until it's time for the band to come in, a guaguancó heavy on the percussion, Andy's bass the heartbeat, Oscar Hernández's piano the circulation. Abraham Rodríguez and young turk Pedrito Martínez sing Trío Los Panchos overlapping harmonies over the rolling drums.
And then, when Jerry hesitates between mikes, Pedrito leaves him his mike, moves up front and begins a rumba that moves the song from celestial to grounded, out of the coco and into the body. The mind-body dialectic not as opposition, but as call and response, a metaphysics of Ochún (pace Víctor Hernandez Cruz).
And that is where you hear what the Fort Apache Band jazzheads Andy & Jerry heard back as smartass teens in their Bronx basement: that New World Africans in the Caribbean (whether Black or jincho or jabao) knew how to construct fractals of sound, break the false modernity of cement and welfare, played in the key of life. That folklore is a myth; descargas are not past, but multiplying universes.
The salsa hardcore was there in the sold-out hall. A group of musicians drove all day after a late gig in Columbus, Ohio, to be in the audience. Others came from D.C. and other corners of the second Boricua diaspora away from the Barrio homeland. People you'd never see in one spot anywhere else anymore.
And thinking back to the Buena Vista tsunami, I knew why some roots do better in the market than others. That moving, steadfast supergroup appealed to the imperial nostalgia the U.S. has for Cuba. A group like GF&EN is a kick-in-the-face reminder that colonized boricuas, at least then (hopefully still), took all their traumas and rewired them into software for enduring.
DY, coming out in March 2009, sounds like a combination between a windowsill herb garden, your grandma's moth-repelling closet liners and a nice jacket.
Or in the over-the-top language of "flavour and fragrance" makers, "sensory innovators" Givaudan, it is a “fruity marine fougére and features an opening accord of ozonic mist,
apple and ginger, a heart of basil, sage and cedar, and base notes of
Brazilian red wood, suede and amber."
I've never quite understood the notion of the celebrity perfume. What is it that I'm supposed to want to smell like if I say I want to smell like J.Lo? For performers, success smells like grajo from sweating like a fiend in synthetic fabrics after a sold-out performance. Yum.
Apparently, the perfume biz has become a bit like publishing -- moving from a long development process and a quest for classics with potential for long-term sales to plastering marquee names on hastily developed menjunjes set to expire when the celeb's fifteen (or thirty or 2.5) minutes do.
A story that ran last week in Puerto Rico's Primera Hora mentions how a merengue-loving resident of Puerta de Tierra had to be shushed during filming of the George Clooney-Ewan McGregor flick "Men Who Stare at Goats," based on a bizarre (and real) Army unit that claims to use paranormal weapons.
S/he was told the sound was disrupting the scene because "no one listens to merengue in Irak."
Aside from the incredible idea that Old San Juan can stand in for wartime Iraq, the production assistant was factually wrong. There is a lot of merengue and bachata and reggaetón in Iraq, in the mp3 players of Dominican-American soldiers (the DR retired its troops from Irak in 2004). The latest Dominican-American killed there was Sgt. Ricky Ulloa in August. There are dozens of others.
[h/t to Jorge for the story. Pix of Clooney on set from Primera Hora by Ana María Abruña]
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]
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.
Apparently, the perfume biz 
