Sound Taste

"No one listens to merengue in Irak"

A story that ran last week in Puerto Rico's Primera Hora mentions how a merengue-loving resident of Puerta de Tierra had to be shushed during filming of the George Clooney-Ewan McGregor flick "Men Who Stare at Goats," based on a bizarre (and real) Army unit that claims to use paranormal weapons.

S/he was told the sound was disrupting the scene because "no one listens to merengue in Irak."

Aside from the incredible idea that Old San Juan can stand in for wartime Iraq, the production assistant was factually wrong. There is a lot of merengue and bachata and reggaetón in Iraq, in the mp3 players of Dominican-American soldiers (the DR retired its troops from Irak in 2004). The latest Dominican-American killed there was Sgt. Ricky Ulloa in August. There are dozens of others.

[h/t to Jorge for the story. Pix of Clooney on set from Primera Hora by Ana María Abruña]

"That one": the benefits of objectification

If consumerism is the now the default way we express ourselves, McCain's little nominal phrase clearly struck the widest and deepest chord among debate watchers last night.

The design above is one of my faves (except for the superfluous comma), but here are a few others I liked.

Soca hangover

Slowly ramping up to regular bloggy activity again, having missed all the politrix excitement (Daddy Yankee's McCain endorsement, the tiro-por-la-culata Tina Fey VP pick, Gustav's still-damaging near-miss, etc.).

Went to the West Indian Parade yesterday, and to J'Ouvert in the wee hours for what I confess is the first time ever, with some excellent company: Wayne, Boima and Joe.

Wayne was disappointed in the lacking Jamaican representation, as was I. Jamaicans may win Olympic medals by the barrelful, but Trinis owned Brooklyn's version of carnival (despite t-shirts boasting that Jamaicans, Bajans, Grenadians, and so on, did).

To my mind, the Haitian contingents were the liveliest -- not just because Wyclef seemed to emerge from the crowd to jump atop some studio-apartment-sized speakers. The fast-fast compa, fortified with more blips and loops than a robot conversation, got all my mid-section Hispaniola solidarity going.

The Grenadian contingent was surprisingly large, both at J'Ouvert and the parade. There seemed to be thousands of red-yellow-green flags waving. Amazing, considering that only 7,205 Grenadians immigrated to New York between 1990 and 2000, and they don't even crack the top 40 immigrant groups to the city.

In the merch front, all the Obama stuff was really quite heartening (as Joe commented, "he's clearly got the foreign vote sewn up.")

[pan-Caribbean wristbands pix by moi] (I'm having technical difficulties posting photos)

We're No. 1!

And I'm not talking about the Olympics (though I've been mesmerized, despite my anti-nationalist leanings).

I'm talking about this news: The U.S. is projected to be a majority-minority country in 2042, not 2050 as previously predicted. Eight years might not seem like much of a difference, but that's about half a generation sooner. Already non-whites rule the toddler set (with one full quarter of under-5s being Latino).

Of course this assumes that immigration laws remain the same as now, which I doubt will be the case much longer. I'm sure the alarmist subtext of this simple statistical projection (The white man is losing control! We're sieged by dirty fer'ners!) will push the border-closers even more over the edge. And I'm not very hopeful about the leanings of those in the federal government, even under an Obama presidency.

And here's another factoid, buried in today's NYT story, that shows that white supremacy and privilege is far from dead:

The share of Americans who identify themselves as white, regardless of their ethnicity, will remain largely unchanged, declining from less than 80 percent in 2010 to about 76 percent when the majority-minority benchmark is reached in 2042.

We already saw hints of this aspiration to racial privilege (or avoidance of stigmatized racial categories) in the 2000 Census, where 48% of Hispanics checked off "white" as their race.

Teaching a class on the histories of racialized groups in the U.S. (including the creation of "whiteness"), over the last few years, I concluded, as Lady Zora does here thinking about a post-Civil Rights Black politics, that we have lost historical consciousness of moments and possibilities of inter-group solidarity. Instead, we end up bunkered in the immediate (and pressing) needs of our own group.

Sorry to be so serious in my one post so far this week. Trying to get a lot of work done while the wolf circles my door. Posting will be sparse for the next couple of weeks.

[image of U.S. racial composite from Time magazine 1993]

"Race" ≠ Black: a wee rant

This really is a wee one, I promise. I'll be back to regular bloggery later this week -- been trying to catch up on real work -- but I just couldn't let pass my reaction to this NYT article about a CNN project airing this week on being "Black in America."

First, the headline: "CNN Trains a Lens on Race." This led me to think the article was about looking at, you know, race. But the lede dispelled that notion: "The notion that there is something called 'black America' is a subject of debate."

The idea of the series, that Obama's candidacy raises the question of to what extent things have improved for Blacks, is a good, important one. But please don't frame it as a "conversation about race." It's a conversation about Blacks and white guilt. Has nothing to do with the rest of us, or even with what could be the underlying social justice goal, dismantling white privilege and supremacy.

So here's my proposal. Can we have a moratorium on using "race" as a euphemism for African-Americans/Blacks?

Making all "race" conversations as something that only involves the Black-white spectrum leaves out the rest of us -- Brown, Yellow, Red, and those who don't even fit the color scheme. And demographics have already superceded this limited vision of American race.

The lead reporter on the series is Soledad O'Brien, a great journalist described in the piece as "biracial," with "a black mother from Cuba and a white father from Australia." Cheers on describing her heritage accurately, but why re-inscribe this Latina as yet another example of how Black & white are mixing in the U.S.?

Another one for the list: urban ≠ Black. No more "urban format" for radio (and for the love of Pete, no more "hurban" either). Urban environments are racially mixed, not "blackened."

Illegal Immigration, solved!

What's better than cute kitties, lexically challenged kitties or polydactyl kitties? Marxist kitties, of course!

Enjoy this lovely and cogent framing of the illegal immigration "debate" as really a convenient forgetting of how the U.S. was founded by another sort of immigrant -- settler colonialists -- who legitimized taking over lands from Natives via, paraphrasing Jared Diamond's formulation, guns, germs, and a ratified constitution that served Europeans' interests and ignored those of Natives, slaves and women.

The Pinky Show also has equally fun segments on the Iraq war, genetically modified organisms, and stupid toys.

Red Hook Food Vendors back, baby!

This coming Saturday, we can finally exhale, and then inhale the delicious scents of pupusas, huaraches, ceviche, chuzos and elotes at the Red Hook Ball Fields.

Late last week received an email message from Cesar Fuentes, rep for the vendors, which said that all the city-required hoops have been jumped, and that pending a Dept. of Health inspection this week, they are ready to go.

Upon our last compliance hurdle being met -that is, the vendors' food trucks and carts passing DOHMH inspection next week- our affair can finally open its season as early as the weekend of July 19th!!

While we are almost certain that most vendors will be compliant & ready to operate by July 19th, we have also set up a 'rain date' for the weekend of July 26th in case the majority of our vendors are required to further adjust their mobile food vending units to meet inspection standards.

I chatted with Rafael Soler (of the Dominican-Salvadoran stand) this past weekend at Brooklyn Flea (where some of the vendors camped temporarily) and he said that he'd had to invest $28,000 in getting his "mobile food unit," aka el tró, up to code.

And note that the traditional start-up time for the vendors has been Memorial Day. So this year, their season has been effectively cut in half. Patronize, people!

UPDATE 7/16/08: As of yesterday, DOH did not pass 6 of the vendors' trucks; another 4 trucks and carts have yet to be inspected. But Fuentes said he is still confident they'll be able to open if not this weekend, then the 26th.

 

[Our lovely model Melanie holds yummy elote last year at the Ball Fields. Pix by moi]

Good-will hunting and sonic weapons

A NYT piece last week about the 1950s USIA program to have jazz musicians tour "hot spots" around the world to improve the image of the US prompted a lively email discussion among a group of friends, some frequent Sound Taste commenters.

One of the key questions was, if the govt. were to embark on a similar program today, what would it look like, given the diminished grab that jazz has?

We all agreed that hip hop is the equivalent globalized musical form that is nonetheless squarely identified with American cool. But how would it work?

Robert (aka Sovietiko) asked

Pero si es Hip Hop, que considero el mayor export de U.S.A ahora mismo, entonces quien seria?  Los que estan rapeando de to'el billete q tienen? Taria duro enviar un artista a Iran a que le diga a ellos "Pana, nadamas el reloj mio vale mas que lo que tu vas a hacer en un ano !!"
o Black Eye Peas con "mi hump, mi hump" ?

If it's hip hop, which I think is the biggest US export right now, then who would it be? The ones rapping about all the money they have? It would be rough to send an artist to Iran to rap "Son, just the watch I'm wearing is worth more than what you make in a year" or Black Eyed Peas with their "my hump, my hump."

This recent piece about Nas made me think he'd be an intriguing choice.

Kiko didn't think it would work at all today.

Como intercambio cultural, cool. Pero NADA tiene ese tipo de relevancia hoy en dia. DONDEQUIERA tan haciendo jazz, rock, hip-hop, etc. Si ha de ir alguien a'pero--o por lo menos popular--el bulto se lo harian, pero de seguro ya ellos tienen su version criolla. Por ej, cuando Paul McCartney toca en Moscú, el bulto no es por el rock, sino porq el es un ex-Beatle.

As a cultural exchange, cool. But NOTHING has that sort of relevance these days. Jazz, rock, hip hop etc. is being made EVERYWHERE. If someone great -- or at least popular -- were to go, the public would love it, but surely they have their own local version. Eg, when Paul McCartney plays Moscow, the big deal is not that it's rock, but that he's an ex-Beatle.

We disagreed a bit on this point. To me, local versions do not entirely substitute for the "authenticity" still credited to, say, gangsta rap stars.

And I totally agreed with Jorge's musical osmosis via military invasion theory:

pensandolo bien, es muy posible ke esten mandando mas artistas de lo ke pensamos ya ke a estas alturas hay tropas gringas en todas partes del universo, or so it seems...

thinking it over, it's quite possible the US govt. is sending out more artists than we think, given that US troops are all over the universe, or so it seems...

American music has often been imported via military occupation (e.g. Dee Dee Ramone first heard rock n roll as an army brat in Germany, and Japan developed a strong jazz culture fed by the American military presence there post-WWII). A couple of folks have started looking at the playlists of soldiers in Iraq & Afghanistan. I wonder how much of that music is filtering locally.

Thinking about this the past couple of days, I guess that the more interesting cultural exchange can no longer be government-sponsored, not just because there's no one with decent taste left working in government, but because it was a pretty suspect endeavor in the first place.

I think the interesting stuff is happening more at the NGO/indy level. Jeff Chang argues here that although gangsta rap is the soundtrack of the world (especially in conflict zones) there might be some room for more "conscious" hip hop to spread grassroots to various non-Western locales.

Not to say I have a rose-colored vision of the possibilities of cultural exchange, given recent co-optations of anthropologists and other social scientists by the military. Michael at La Guayabita wondered whether ethno/musicologists are likewise being recruited. Seeing recent uses of music as a weapon, I woudn't doubt it.

[1958 pix of Dave Brubeck in Baghdad from Brubeck collection via NYT; pix of Nas by Justin Stephens via NY Mag; pix of soldier w iPod via weikhang.com]

Latinas opened the door for gay marriage, Pt. 2

This week we found out New York has opened a back-door way to legalize gay marriage in the state. And once again, like I wrote about here, there's a courageous Latina setting precedent.

Gov. David Paterson's decision to have state agencies draw up rules consistent with accepting same-sex marriages performed in places where it is legal to do so (such as Canada, Massachusetts and, maybe soon, California) was based on a court case decided a few months back, Martinez v. Monroe County.

Rochester residents Patricia Martinez and Lisa Ann Golden won the right to have Martinez's health benefits as a community college administrator extended to her spouse, who she'd married in Canada in 2004. Not a shocker that health insurance has become important enough to warrant enduring a rough, invasive court proceeding.

The case was reported when the decision came down, and was clearly recognized as a precedent-setter. The news this week in the low-key directive drafted by the gov's legal counsel was that by asking state agencies to revise their policies and regulations to recognize same-sex marriages performed legally elsewhere, Paterson was institutionalizing a potentiality.

Let me be clear. I'm not a defender of the importance of marriage as a concept. After all, the institution was invented to control women and property (thanks, Engels!). But seeing families and couples denied rights automatically granted to any random married couple is just wrong.

[Pix of Patricia Martinez and Lisa Ann Golden via NYT]

To Boldly Go

Just as a friend thought enough of my post about the Cali Supremes decision on gay marriage and Latinos to re-post it in its entirety, I can't say that I can improve on mole333's post over at the fabulous Culture Kitchen. Nothing like the meeting of geekery and social justice.

Now that the California Supreme Court (all but ONE of whose judges were appointed by Republican Governors, mind you) has declared marriage equality Constituional, we can congratulate George Takei (better known as Mr. Sulu in the original Star Trek) and Brad Altman for their upcoming marriage.

Photo from George Takei.com.

I should note that when non-controversial (which often means "safe-seeming to your Average American) do controversial things, it breaks barriers better than when controversial people do controversial things. The death of Rock Hudson from AIDS made it acceptable in America to die of AIDS. That may sound strange to many, but before Rock Hudson died of AIDS, I remember many people who died suddenly "after an illness" and no one would dare speak the name of the illness. It may have been Magic Johnson who made it okay to LIVE with AIDS in America, but Rock Hudson taught America to accept AIDS as something we didn't have to speak of in mere whispers.

Perhaps the marriage of likeable (and "safe-seeming to the average American") George Takei and his parnter of 21 years (longer term than the vast majority of "traditional" marriages) can break down barriers better than the marriage of someone like Ellen DeGeneres could.

Congratulations to George and Brad.

Congrats indeed. They're going early, but many are following.