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.
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.
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).
Longtime musical globetrotter Rob Weisberg has a cool survey of Obama praise songs in the WNYC art.cult blog. A lot of Kenyan and African-American samples I hadn't seen before, including the one below, from Congolese singer now in DC Samba Mapangala featuring awesome 14-year-old Minneapolis rapper Fanaka Ndege ("hip hop meets rumba").
Rob played some of these and other good stuff in his WFMU show, Transpacific Sound Paradise Saturday and tonight at 6 pm. So tune in while you wait for polls to close. Relax. Dance a little.
Deadline to register has passed; think of this as positive reinforcement to hit the polls in a couple of weeks.
Never mind the Palin effect on guys. I know lots of red-blooded guys of all persuasions who would follow Rosario Dawson till the ends of the earth. As the most prominent celeb attached to the Voto Latino project, she comes off as smart, conscientious and a good sport.
The "La Pasión del Voto" series of videos can drag sometimes, but its evocation of telenovela clichés is spot-on (seriously people, it's hard to parody such over-the-top aesthetics), and there's just no way to go wrong with an adaptation of "I Want to Live in America" (Get out the Vote in America). If you want, just skip over to 4:25 for it. And ignore Wilmer Valderrama's off-key singing.
God bless obsessive fans. It's the only reason that YouTube has as many Latin musical performances as it does.
Variety shows never went out of style in Latin America, so lots of groups performed on TV, providing a great visual archive of music and performers. That is, if the TV stations kept archives.
When I was trying to work on a doc on a Dominican musician a few years ago, we found out that it was nearly impossible to get archival footage, because tapes had either fallen apart, been re-used or simply damaged by heat and humidity.
But there are lots of VHS tapes taken off the air signal, lovingly dubbed and re-dubbed, and now on YouTube. I've actually become a connoisseur of sorts of the textures produced by various grades of decay.
I would date this video of "Pájaro Chowí" performed by Wilfrido Vargas y sus Beduinos to the late 70s by the width of the shirt collars and the circumference of the afros. This is the band almost at the height of its powers (which I think was 1980-1981), and a great example of all the lessons Vargas learned from salsa bands and dominicanized. Hard on the horns and letting the piano montuno anchor.
Vargas here is a great trumpet, backup voice and arranger (an informant just put Wilfrido's trumpeting in doubt). He didn't feel the need to take the central spotlight (a mistake he made later, just as Willie Colón did). Sandy Reyes' much sweeter voice does justice to the song.
My favorite part comes about 2:35, when "Yo estoy cantando" slows down the song and everything drops out except for a percolating piano, and discreet tambora and güira. And then the horns explode again. (Alas, the song cuts off).
Coinciding with the end of Shea Stadium (and yet another Mets season), there's one shiny memory bit that's surfaced. This week, Epic released "The Clash: Live at Shea Stadium," the recordings of the 1982 concert where they opened for the Who.
In this AP story, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon recall their meetup with the headliners slightly differently:
Clash bassist Paul Simonon recalled the Who's Pete Townshend coming into the dressing room to kick a soccer ball around, but Roger Daltrey "wouldn't talk to us."
Jones is more gracious in his memory, saying he "adored" the Who and was honored to play on the same bill.
"There
was a certain element of passing on the baton," he said. "They were on
one of their farewell tours and we were an up-and-coming group. We came
from the same area of London so we felt there was some kind of a bond.
That was probably why we were asked to do it."
One speculation about why the show was recorded in the first place is that the band was filming the video for "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" (for the record, one of my least favorite Clash songs).
Doesn't make a lot of sense, but while I wait to get the record (even in these peanut-butter-and-tortilla times) here is the video in question, with footage of the band arriving in the grotty parking lot and a live version of the song. Ah, Queens. Ah, Shea.
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).
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"
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.
