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."
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 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.
The party happened last week, but today's the birthday of one Juan Pablo Pacheco, one of the major architects of classic Fania salsa.
It took me ages to realize Pacheco was Dominican (in so many ways salsa was popularly coded as Cuban-Puerto Rican). And to fully appreciate what an outlier he was.
Not only was his dad a bandleader for the Trujillo-sponsored (but nonetheless jamming) Orquesta Santa Cecilia, but he arrived in NY in the 1940s, before most other Dominican families, and his family integrated into a community of musicians in one of the Golden Eras of Latin music -- mambo!
A while ago, he talked about a memoir he was writing, one that would cover his formation and the incredible innovations in sound recording, stagecraft and image management that shaped some of the most enduring New York musical products of the century. I have yet to see any sign of the completed book, but it's one I'm dying to read.
In any case, here's a little taste of Pacheco at his prime, Fania All Stars in their African tour doing "En Orbita." Check how he conducts the band with his whole body, like a rumbero eliciting the drum beats with hips, feet and shoulders.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
