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.
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.
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.
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.)
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]
Amid lots of deadlines, taking a second to breathe.
Yesterday, I couldn't get Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come" out of my head. Today, it's the Jerry González invocation of the spirits, a thanks for a cleansing, an invitation. "Vamos pá la rumba, vamos pá la rumba, ya yo me curé, y me despojé."
Trying to hold the cynic back, just for a minute.
In the morning light, you exchange knowing smiles, small comments. "It's a good day." "Yes. It is."
Not like last night, walking with a contingent of black and brown people from East Harlem to 125th St. Fireworks. Taxis beeping. People poking heads out of public housing windows to wave. Random hugs. Lots and lots of screaming. Witnessing. Communing.
Nagging thoughts pipe up in small voices as I hear the victory speech: yes, he is echoing MLK's speech, but that means we're still in the same Civil Rights Era narrative. This morning: the media talk about "breaking racial barriers" as if now we're done with racism and the fight for social justice; it took so much energy to make a Black, biracial, child of immigrant, majority-minority-state raised, African-connected, Asian-connected, organizing-connected, education-connected man Mr. President, I am afraid the momentum will dissipate.
Do we know what to do next? The work is just starting.
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.
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.
you make sure someone else voted?
