Sound Taste

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.

Friday Khan

Never got a chance to lament the passing of Ricardo Montalbán, who was way more than a white suit and a Corinthian leather pusher.

Not only was he a Latin lover and a tough guy (and sometimes Asian), but he was all that and a cleavaged white pompadour-rockin' superhuman in my favorite of his roles, Khan Noonian Singh (who despite his pan-South Asian name was clearly Latino -- just listen to him enunciate the one Latino crew member's name upon reanimation).

Check this Robot Chicken Italian opera claymation version of the movie, yet another on-point miniature marvel.

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?

Visual postscripts to the Inauguration

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.

It's a New Dawn, It's a New Day, It's a New Life for Me...

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]

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.

Pre-Turkey workout

I've been remiss and not yet dropped in to Geko Jones' Tuesday joint, Que Bajo? at Rose Live in W'burg.

But you can and should. (Maybe I will too).

Perfect for the recession -- no cover. They've been having some great guests, and more to come.

Geko's description:
A latin weekly focusing on Afro-Colombian and tropical rhythms like cumbia, gaita, bullerengue, palo, gaga champeta, mambo y mas.

Out there latin rhythms than you can play with a ta-te-quieto stick- especialmente scraped from the bottom of el caldero by resident DJ's Geko Jones and Uproot Andy

Never a cover charge doors @ 9pm

345 Grand St (btw Havemayer/Marcy)
Williamsburg
L Train to Lorimer
No Cover. Kitchen open late.

Another Negro milestone?

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]

Vin Diesel's Excellent Dominican Adventure

A big convoy truck, supposedly with $1.4M of gasoline, rolls down a highway lined by dry, rocky hills. A lovely (if thoroughly unbelieveable) hijacking sequence follows. But what caught my eye was the tag: "Location: Dominican Republic." Huh?
Fast & Furious

The almost dialogue-free sequence on the trailer in front of the ho-hum Quantum of Solace was for next year's Fast & Furious, the fourth in the boys-and-their-cars series. (The hijacking is shot nicely, which is more than I can say for the action sequences in the Bond flick.)

The IMDB description only mentions Mexico, which makes sense for a movie based on land travel. So did the setting change? Was it that Diesel, a born-again Dominican (though he has not officially ever addressed whether he has any blood ties to the island), is following through on his promise to his favorite president that he would help raise the DR's profile in the film industry?

I can get into action movies (I was, after all at a Bond flick), but I'm not a big fan of this particular type. Nonetheless, I know that the F&F series has very deliberately aimed for the brown-boy demo and I think it's pretty cool to see the DR as a credible setting (as opposed to the background shots in the Miami Vice remake and the various cinematic impersonations of Cuba the DR is usually used for).

And as a bonus, the cast also has Dominican halfie Michelle Rodriguez (who is always better when she speaks little and kicks ass) and Tego Calderón in a supporting role. Hmmm.

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]