I remember some of the first emails I sent out on this date eight years ago, after a very long day working -- because I was a newspaper reporter then, and that is what we do, run toward the things that everyone else runs from. Many of them said, "There are no words."
But I was wrong. There are lots of words. Especially poetry. Sister Suheir Hammad was one of the poets who gathered up some of the necessary words.
I've been away from you a bit, no note, no "see ya later." Needed to recogerme a bit, to simplify. (Though of course, that hasn't applied to the evil FB.)
So sorry I've been away, but I am back now. Like someone who hasn't spoken in a while, my voice is raspy and rough. I hope to be back to my regular 3-times-a-week schedule. Thanks to those of you who noticed and emailed me and asked me to come back. It's nice to be missed.
Lots of us are thinking about this watershed, and I doubt I have the most intelligent, insightful things to say about the King of Pop. I'm waiting to hear from several of my music writer colleagues who've spent more time thinking about the post-Black, post-sexual global star (who was nonetheless irreducibly Black and irreducibly thought of in terms of his sexuality).
In this rendition, the chorus is annoying as heck, but the oufit is mesmerizing, even by Jackson 5 standards. And the lyrics now seem to be about our own ambivalence to Michael. "Ben, most people would turn you away
/ I don't listen to a word they say
/ They don't see you as I do
/ I wish they would try to."
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)
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).
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.
No, not the dark Australian crooner, but the Chicago artist whose mesmerizing Soundsuits are everywhere, it seems. Costume, sculpture, fetish, furry, dance, found object, artesanía, locura? All of the above. I missed the New York showing at Jack Shainman, but am seriously considering heading west for the current exhibit at Yerba Buena.
As impressive as they are as objects, I think only seeing the suits in motion reveals their true splendor.
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.
In the middle of my Miti Miti jag, I started going to see La Sovietika (named after a Dominican term for loose women) and came to the conclusion: tigueraje is back. Not that it ever went away.
The band's sound sometimes reminds me of those mid-80s post-punk dips into dance, reggae, soukous. And the lyrics? Well, the lyrics are perfectly earnest satire of Caribbean men's desire for women ("Diablo morena tú si que tá buena"), of the ridiculousness of rock/merengue/reggeatón dreams ("voy a hacerme un tatuaje que diga 'perdóname madre'"), of how being broke is no excuse for not having a good time.
And the stage presence is a cross between CBGB's mid-1980s hardcore matinee and Third World backyard rockero -- stretched-out t-shirts and scuffed-up sneakers. In other words, the Sovietikos are pure medalagananarios. And I mean that as a compliment.
They're playing tonight at 8 pm sharp at Trash Bar in Williamsburg. Check 'em out. It's cheap (open bar 8-9 pm), and I guarantee you will laugh and maybe dance a little.
Two disclaimers: 1) I've been friends with Robert on guitar and Jorge on bass for many years; 2) I am a sucker for tigueraje and experimentation.
NYRemezcla wrote a semi-swoony interview with the band in October (it doesn't hurt that Trash Bar, LS's most regular venue, is near the Remezcla offices). Whether they attract more attention (or want it) remains to be seen.
Is the band a goof? Is it a serious endeavor? To me, it doesn't entirely matter, as I love how it reminds me of the looser, more playful, more curious side of music and arts. Making the most of inadequate spaces, focusing on the vibe rather than the image.
Check the extremely amateur video below of "Yo Quisiera." In another show I saw, for this song lead singer Stallion dropped trou to show boxers with the words "Meet My Little Friend." Juvenile? Totally. Endearing? I thought so.
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.
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.
Tropical beaches choked with garbage, untreated sewage muddying turquoise waters. The flip side of the tourism brochures.
I was sorry to miss the RUS (Residuos Urbanos Sólidos) Basurama project in Santo Domingo working with the local art collective Picnic, which last week put up a tsunami of garbage on the Malecón at Máximo Gómez, one of the major crossroads of the city center.
Yeah, I know, tsunamis happen in the Pacific, not the Caribbean, which is hurakán territory, but the image is lovely -- a curtain/wave of discarded green, blue and white plastic collected at a dump outside the city, interrupting the horizon view of the sea, hovering over traffic, threatening the passersby.
RUS, a year-long continental project by the Spanish group Basurama (English description), is a series of clever art-activist actions that puts together site-specific projects connecting industrial-world consumerism, waste streams and the labor that manages it in Latin America (and the developing world).
In México City, they customized the carts used by pepenadores/scrap metal collectors and redesigned some of them to become games that would easily fit in with the street circus culture that exists in the city. Videos documenting project here.
In Miami, they found an abandoned pickup truck bed, and by collecting pieces at the car parts junk marts spread around the city, turned the pickup into a mobile club-ready light and music maker. Videos here.
In DR, the project looked at the garbage that collects along the Malecón, and the tons of garbage produced by the sprawling city and sent out to vast dumps, garbage cities, picked over by the poorest of the poor (this scene repeats itself outside just about all the large cities in the world -- settlements and economies sustained by garbage). The curtain/wave of garbage went up last weekend. The series of videos here.
For me, the project brought up a lot of memories, about the degradation of El Malecón, the city's old point of public relaxation, which I could see and smell from my childhood home, the spot for cruising, strolling, canoodling, chimi-buying, kite-flying, the annual carnaval parade (in one of the videos, you see carnaval characters known as los Africanos, which is an odd example of Black people in Blackface, but which to me also evokes sweat, labor, the garbage people). It has been a space to breathe.
But as I've mourned before, public space in my old city is not what it was. I am still disoriented, so I gravitate to projects that act to reclaim these spaces.
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.
