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."
Summer's not official for another month yet, but my post-semester break gave me a chance to catch up with West Coast friends and do the things I normally don't have time to: check random cultural events and read a frakin' novel.
Went to a screening of Smile Pinki, a sort of anti-"Slumdog" that won the Oscar this year for best short doc. Done by Megan Mylan, who also did the devastating Lost Boys of Sudan, the film is simple and deeply undramatic, and I mean that as a compliment. Basically, we follow closely a few families in Uttar Pradesh, India, helped by Smile Train, which provides free surgery to kids with cleft lips and palates.
Surgery to fix this birth defect is relatively simple. Not getting it can cripple a child for life. Pre-surgery, the kids in the movie can't speak properly, have trouble eating and drinking, and are kept from school to avoid ridicule and shame for the family. The arc of the film is simple: social worker locates children, parents take long trips (mostly on foot) to get to the hospital in Banares, surgery is done, child is rendered "normal."
Yet aside from the feel-good aspect of the film, what struck me was how this was about everyday heroics: of the social workers who don't judge families' reluctance to engage with authorities or their superstitions or fatalism; the families and neighbors who sacrifice a lot to get these kids to the hospital; the doctors who perform over 3,000 surgeries a year. Recognizing her own position in the larger situation, Mylan said in a Q&A after the screening, "What's important is empowering local doctors to be able to do the work using their own judgment."
The short will screen at MoMA June 7 as part of The New India film series.
And now for the coincidence. I arrived at the screening with a copy of Jeff in Venice/Death in Varanasi (the latter city is also known as Benares/Banares/Kashi), a dyptich novel (or a doubled novella) which is likewise deceptive in its simplicity.
I love Geoff Dyer and will read anything he writes, even a crazy letter (see comments) he submits as a non-submission for an anthology on literary mortification. Out of Sheer Rage was a painfully hilarious book about the impossibility of writing a decent book about DH Lawrence, and But Beautiful, about jazz, is one of my all-time favorite pieces of music writing. I was also touched more than I understood by his meditation on Camus in Oran.
So, this novel (which is infinitely better than the similarly pun-titled Paris, Trance) starts, duh, riffing off Thomas Mann. But Jeff Atman, the addled, jaded junketeer mag writer in the first half, like all of Dyer's entropy-seeking writer types, experiences the perfect love affair (perfect, because it only lasts a few days and has no room for disappointment).
Tucked into all the dismissive, louche party-hopping quips (he is in Venice for the Biennale with all the other art-fkrs) are committed, sincere immersions into art and its effects on the desiring viewer (kinda reminded me of the art-appreciation moments of Talk to Her and of my own encounters with pieces like Las Meninas). All while sniffing coke off a mirror used to view a Tintoretto ceiling. The vibe is light, silly, but sediments into melancholy, hunger, middle-aged panic.
And then there's the second half, about an unnamed writer (a later Jeff?) who goes to the ghats, the funeral pyres by the Ganga, on a travel mag assignment and just stays. Yet again, what could be a silly European man-goes-native cliché reveals unexpected depth, about what one needs in life, what constitutes fulfillment and how difficult it is to let go of desire.
Are Indians mere background? Yes and no. Because the writer's vague quest is, in the end, irrelevant to the people around him. He eventually blends into the background, and ends up either enlightened, fevered, insane or all of the above.
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]
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.
A stamp commemorating Martinican poet and anti-colonialist Aimé Césaire was issued by the French post office this week, just after the one-year anniversary of his death. Gotta love the stern, uncompromising posture, the refusal to smile.
Repeat after me: just because the average (Anglo-white monolingual)
U.S. pundit has not heard of a book, writer or cultural figure does not
make it "obscure."
Almost uniformly, the first round of news reports in U.S. media about
the book gift characterized Open Veins as "obscure" (examples here and here) or outright dismissed it as a leftist tract. In
Spanish-language accounts like this one, it's more neutrally referred to as "a classic of the Latin American left." And at least one English-speaking newspaper writer (albeit in the UK) seems to be familiar with it.
Open Veins of Latin America, written shortly before Galeano's native Uruguay would end up under a harsh military dictatorship and he in exile, was the model for his idiosyncratic, semi-poetic, semi-polemic, but indelible writing style.
A perennial big seller, it's gone through 50 Spanish-language editions and been translated into at least a dozen languages. And name one US-authored "pamphlet" that has had its own ska-punk song by a world-famous band.
Like his more mature masterpiece trilogy Memory of Fire, Open Veins mined a trove of documents to undo the willed forgetfulness imposed by so many Latin American governments and by fantasies about how the American Dream is underwritten.
Is the hard-line Marxist-Leninist language a bit dated? Perhaps. Has the
analysis survived intact for 38 years? Not really, though the main
points about rapacious U.S. capitalism in Latin America still
hold up well enough (see ongoing military support in Colombia and fights over
gas and other "raw" materials).
Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a long-time critic of Galeano in general and Open Veins in particular, wrote in Foreign Policy that "its content has been
ridiculed line by line by that most cruel of literary critics -- reality," using examples of rising economies among formerly colonized nations like Brazil. That clearly must mean that we're done with imperialism and strong-armed exploitation of resources. Just like Obama's presidency has ended racism.
(If you recognize the last name, yes, he is Mario's son, who uses his patronymic and matronymic last names in incorrect order to retain the name recognition without which he would long have been dismissed as the knee-jerk neoliberalist buffoon he is.)
Not that Galeano is as behind the times as Alvarito would like his fans to think. He had some more up-to-date advice for Pres. Obama after his election, advice that might have come in handy before saying in Trinidad that "I didn't come to debate the past. I come to deal with the future."
The past is not so easily forgotten for Latin Americans, and for Cono Sur people least of all. In a Nov. 5 interview with Amy Goodman, Galeano asked for less, not more, "leadership" from the U.S. in Latin America:
We
don’t need any foreign leadership. Let it be. Let reality be as it
wants to be, with no ruling state deciding the destiny of other
countries. Please, no more. Stop with this tradition of the messianic
mission of, you know, saving the world.
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.
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.
My interest in high fashion tends to begin and end with ANTM. Not a snob thing, just not my bag.
But the Fashionista pix and post of Arlenis Sosa (h/t to Giselle Rodríguez Cid) caught my eye. #1, she's got the mancha de plátano smack in the middle of that beautiful forehead (esp. when you see her more "natural" shots). #2, according to this NY Mag bio-chronology, her big assignments seem to be ones where she's figured as Black "African." (which, really, is just about the only way high fashion tends to see Black women anyway. Always back to Saartjie Baartman, in't?).
I am digging how African fashion (of Africa, by Africans, for Africans) has been getting more play on its own terms. Not that it means non-whites have any significant space on the catwalk, no matter what Vicki Woods says.
In the Models.com video here, Arlenis (her name alone is like a Quisqueya gang signal) represents Monte Cristi, far removed from the capital, bordering Haiti, as unlikely a place to grow supermodels as Siberia. I <3 the comments, where her cousins and assorted Dominicans pop up in all their untranslated beauty.
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.
