Sound Taste

Friday Suheir

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.

Affirm life.

My Indian Summer

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.

Geoff Dyer. Crazy white man I like.

Event: Reggaetón anthology at Centro tomorrow

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]

On "obscure" writers: a wee rant

Even before having one of his early books shoot up to #2 on Amazon thanks to a well-placed plug, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano was far from "obscure."

Is The Wretched of the Earth obscure? Is How Europe Underdeveloped Africa obscure? Depends on your book shelf, I guess.

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.

Maybe it would be better if Brother President is not Superman after all.

Pedro Pietri wishes you Happy National Poetry Month

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.

[Out-of-focus 2000 Senate campaign poster via El Puerto Rican Embassy]

Everything you always wanted to know about NY Dominicans (but were afraid to ask)

Not exactly.

But I am interested in following the conversation over at the NYT City Room blog with Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, author of A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950, a historical study of how Dominican identity is formed entre aquí y allá.

Given that Dominicans have been immigrating in significant numbers to NY for some four or five decades (depending on when you start counting), and that beyond-the-Census estimates of their presence in NY circle around 800,000 (one out of ten New Yorkers), it's really amazing how little non-Dominicans/non-Latinos still know about the basics of 1) Latino culture; 2) Latin American/Caribbean history; 3) basic NYC demographics.

A sampling of the questions asked:

Outside of the Lower East Side and East/Spanish Harlem are Dominicans concentrated in other parts of the City?

many Dominican women dress as though they believed that their bodies - and by extension, their sexuality - are all that they have to offer the world. Is this an accurate assessment, and, if so, what accounts for it?

Dominicans have changed completely the NY image. The are uneducated and no manners. Washington heights is a perfect example of what they are capable of. Where ever there’s a large population of Dominicans, Property values go down, the area becomes sort of ghetto like.

OK, these are the most annoying ones. Some of the other questions run a little deeper -- about brain drain migration to Miami, about government corruption, about the extent of a Dominican political lobby in the U.S. And of course, a question about Dominican hair styling.

If I put on my teaching hat, I have to say that there are no stupid questions. But why do we always have to explain the most basic stuff over and over and over again?

I don't envy Prof. Hoffnung-Garskof having to address these questions. Having done one of these for my book Nueva York, patience and focusing on constructive engagement is the name of the game.

In that spirit, I'd encourage y'all to post your own questions.

[Sorry. Can't remember where I got image of Marge Simpson with a Dominican blow-out]

UPDATE 3/18/09: First set of answers here. A basic primer on the origins of Dominican migration, a discussion on Dominican (and working-class immigrant) participation in higher education, and an outline on why newer immigrants do not fall predictably along the US Dem-Rep axis. I bet he's saving the Blackness question for the next installment.

Re-orienting axes

In Mohsin Hamid's tight and compelling The Reluctant Fundamentalist, narrator Changez (the book isn't nearly as heavy-handed as the name suggests) reaches the point of no return in his alienation from the American imperialist dream (complete with high-power finance job and gringa girlfriend) in Valparaiso, Chile. He visits Pablo Neruda's home and finds a point of connection he's lost in post-9/11 New York:

...the home of Neruda did not feel as removed from Lahore as it actually was; geographically, of course, it was perhaps as remote a place as could be found on the planet, but in spirit it seemed only an imaginary caravan ride away from my city, or a sail by night down the Ravi and Indus.

To me, it's not just the "universal poetry" of Neruda or the mountain views from La Sebastiana that make it an apt place for Changez to have his epiphany. It's because he likely recognizes a setting where the connection between politics and everyday life is more direct and honest than in 2002 U.S., with naive "who me?" policies condemning some and secretly encouraging others. Latin Americans have long memories for that approach, and Chile especially so.

While the U.S. tries to mend relations in several parts of the world, Latin America is forgotten, except as a perennial source of slave cheap workers and scapegoats for current labor conditions. And in turn, Latin America is starting to think of the U.S. as a player among many, not the only game in town.

I thought about this when I saw the new Chinatown project in Santo Domingo, an indicator of the DR's deep interest in Chinese investment beyond the creation of free trade zones.

It also jumped out at me seeing a story about one of the most popular novelas in Brazil right now, Caminho das Indias, a caste-crossed lovers story with Brazilian actors speaking Portuguese but outfitted in saris and dropping Hindi. Partly filmed in Jaipur and Agra, it is a fantasia of an "exotic," "colorful" culture (pace O Clone/El Clon) and does stick to a lot of Orientalist clichés, but even the most realist novelas are high melodrama and require a broad brush, so I see it more as normalizing India as a source of power and glamour.

Check this matchmaking scene:

And last in my list of evidence of Global South nods to appeal to the Chinese-Indian economies is a literary magazine I was brought from Delhi called Vislumbres (after Octavio Paz's mostly annoying essays written during his time as Mexican ambassador to India in the 1960s).

Financed by the consulates in Spain and several Latin American countries, it's a gorgeous journal in red-black-white that vaguely recalls Soviet constructivist art. Trilingual (English-Spanish-Portuguese) it has work by Latin American writers about India and Indian subcontinent writers about Latin America. Some of the work is lovely impressionistic, some borders on mutual exoticism, but the effort was what fascinated me, the gesture to dialogue.

A Universal History of Infamy

 Yesterday's NYT story about critical darling Roberto Bolaño possibly fictionalizing his heroin use cracked me up.

The guy writes about myths created around writers and conflicting perspectives on memories and events. And we are shocked, shocked that his alter ego on paper does not exactly correspond to the man in the flesh?

As Julio Ortega writes in an El País article the NYT cites, Bolaño "no había previsto que después de su muerte sería, en inglés, otro Bolaño, y tendría el papel espectacular de una nueva vida" (he had not foreseen that after his death he would be yet another Bolaño and would have a spectacular role in a new life).

It was an open secret for the last decade among those who read Spanish that Bolaño was the real deal. But not until he posthumously becomes a New Yorker favorite does he exist in the world literature market (because translations into English get refracted into other languages, and praise in US and UK literary gossip rags journals catches the attention of the English-reading elites everywhere).

This lack of imagination is one of the reasons the U.S. is still stuck using the "magical realism" paradigm to understand postmodern non-realist Latin American literature. And that even as critics and the public denounce all manner of memoirs discovered to be inaccurate or out-and-out invented, we demand more writing about "the real," a ticket to experience all the more marvelous for its too-good-to-be-true trajectory.

Did Bolaño, as he describes in the essay "Beach," quit heroin? Was he in Chile during the Allende coup and jailed, as he writes about in "Dance Card"? Personally, I don't care. I don't need a Romantic myth of the suffering dissipated artist to read his stuff. The writing is what it is -- riveting.

In the lit classes I've taught in the past couple of years (mostly Latino lit), I've been quite stunned at students' absolute embrace of the aesthetics of "realness." No matter how polished or stylized or elaborated the depictions of "street life," they judge these stories by how "true" they are to how they see their lives and the lives of those around them. Even though none of them really live in a 50 Cent video.

The absurd, fantasy, psychedelia, allegory, exaggeration, all these things they reject as "unreal" and therefore not worth their time, even though a lot play video games that are nothing if not all of the above.

I've been pondering a screed against "the real" in literature. Because the truth is that if the U.S. publishing industry is about to become extinct, no one buys books, or reads them (especially fiction), what obligation is there to playing by the rules? Why not exit the market system altogether (.pdfs as the new .mp3s), reject the distinction between the real and the imagined, write without thinking of what will sell? Maybe I am a Romantic after all.

[photo by MARCEL.LÍ SÀENZ via El País]

Who killed the (non-white, non-male) music critic?: a wee rant

Whining about how blogging killed the radio star, er, I mean the professional critic, is getting to be a tiresome sport.

Nonetheless, a panel called "Death of the Critic?: A Roundtable on the Future of Music Criticism in the Digital Age," hosted by my long-time colleague and friend Ann Powers at USC's Norman Lear Center a couple of weeks ago, caught my eye.

The panelists were mostly veteran writers attached to at least one print publication. As the more "credible" critics, they usually assess what those wacky kids are doing on the internets. I didn't get a gander at the talks, but I can guess that since it is no longer cool to trash blogs, someone must have followed the common-sense talking points below.

Is writing about art & pop on the internet better or worse than in print? There be good blogs and cringe-y blogs. Eventually, you only find time to read the former.

The amateur v. professional thing? Well, the hallowed writers of (rock) music criticism weren't really  inverted-pyramid professionals -- that was supposed to be the whole point of rock journalism. Hip hop writers were supposed to break the mold set by rock writers. Jazz writers, on the other hand, might as well be string theorists.

Is everyone writing about the same thing? Nope. Just as the mp3/MySpace revolution means more and more specific subscenes and more experimentation among some fans, the bloggyverse allows you to find someone writing about every genre and every scene.

Has the shrinking space and consumer report trending of criticism in mainstream (and even alternative) print outlets pushed a lot of longer-form, more idiosyncratic writing to the web? Duh.

Now, this discussion rarely mentions race or gender. Because the market and media pressures are all supposed to affect us the same. But they don't.

Ernest Hardy's talk at the panel hit a lot of my sore spots. He minces not:

It’s as though Pitchfork fucked Vice and now their smug, smarmy progeny are building new plantations atop the rapidly eroding topsoil of access and cultural power.

He calls blogs kept by veteran writers and other passionate writers "slave shacks" where "the music and the criticism are still jumping."

And he hits the entrenched institutional issues in the head. It's not just the economy, stupid, it's about who is doing the choosing, who editors picture as either the knowledgeable or versatile writer when it comes time to assign (which of course, creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: writers who are assigned different stories in different outlets look more "reliable" to yet more editors).

And remember, as more newspapers simply pick up a lot of material from wire services, syndicated and parent chains, it disproportionately amplifies the influence of those people with steady critic gigs.

Ernest writes:

the real problem, much like with the Republican Party, isn’t just the low and shrinking number of people of color; it’s in the mindset that makes the erasure of some and the elevation of others so reflexive and natural as to go barely noticed or commented upon except by those being squeezed out, and their voices are very easily dismissed, their perspectives are undervalued in the first place.

In other words, the black & brown (and female) who bitch about not getting assignments -- despite having decades of experience -- are just bitter race/gender warriors. Of course, no one will say it. Because it would hurt to call our colleagues/bosses racist or sexist.

It's all very complicated, the same sort of pipeline issues you see in a lot of fields (journalism, academia, arts, science).

Class issues aside, it is still more likely that women and non-whites have to think hard about entering careers that require long apprenticeships and rarely deliver work that pays well steadily. Even for those of us who develop the ambition and learn the career path, we are less likely to have support networks and access to resources that allow us to make it through. And are more likely to be knocked off track by life issues -- family, health.

When I was a teen, my dream job was to write at the Village Voice. I never had the nerve to push my way onto an internship there (nor could I afford to work for free). When I did start working for an alt weekly after college (SF Weekly; Ann was my first editor there), I lost momentum after a few years for a lot of reasons -- I was still insecure about my talents, I got sucked into graduate school, I got tired of writing the same "Latin rock" story and did not know where to go next.

My music & arts criticism career has been start-and-stop through the past twenty years. Because I've had too many interests, because pitching is exhausting, because I get distracted by the need to pay the mortgage, because I've wondered if I didn't have better things to do.

And I can't say I have it figured out yet. But my own story aside, I am shocked at just how few women and brown/black people are out there. Ann is by far the most recognizable female pop music critic, because she has maintained a presence in major outlets (Spin, Village Voice, NY Times, LA Times). But for the average reader of writing about music, naming five other prominent women music critics takes some work.

There are a handful of Black music critics in major outlets (oh Kelefah Sanneh, how I miss you!). And I am glad for the return of Danyel Smith to Vibe. But now that Ramiro Burr is out at the San Antonio Express, I dare anyone out there to name a Latino music critic whose work you regularly read (Leila Cobo at Billboard is more like a business reporter in my book). Raquel Rivera is up-and-coming, but people only think of her when it comes to reggaetón, a "minor" genre. Oliver Wang or Jeff Chang aside, Asians aren't even on the map.

Want another marker of how crazy this all is, and proof of Ernest's point that we have in fact devolved? Check the TOC of the just-released "Best Music Writing 2008." Out of 32 essays, I count 3 5 women (sorry for the mistake, Daphne!), and maybe 3-4 nonwhites (sorry, there's about a dozen folks here I can't identify racially for sure). The also-ran list, which Idolator ran in four parts, does a wee bit better.

On yesterday's Soundcheck, Nelson George avoided the racial tally altogether, chanting the "quality" mantra. Which is legitimate, but the question is, how did the "quality" pool get to have so few writers who are not whiteboy music geeks? (This last said descriptively -- I have loved too many whiteboy music geeks, in print, in friendship and more).

The 2007 edition did a little better gender-wise, as did the 2006 edition, edited by Mary Gaitskill (?!) and Daphne Carr. Color-wise? A drop better too.

So we plug away, look to own our presses (or blogspots, or typepads or wordpresses). There's nothing else to do.

RIP Edgardo Vega Yunqué

A couple of weeks ago, I ran into Ed Vega on the B67 heading into Park Slope. I was in a rush, he looked like just another melancholy boricua, I would have passed him by had he not been wearing a De La Vega t-shirt.

We rode together for a couple of stops, talked about how he had finished yet another mss., this one in response to the brouhaha with his publisher over the novel that was supposed to come out in July, "Rebecca Horowitz, Puerto Rican Sex Freak." The rest was small talk. I kissed him goodbye and said I'd call in a couple of weeks. Here's a brief obit.

We had met about a month before, when he had found me and asked me to write about the dispute over "Rebecca Horowitz." He claimed the publisher was trying to censor the book. I promised to look into it, but the story never quite jelled.

We talked a long time in that lunch in Olive Vine's cool garden, and the conversation was quintessential Vega: it had near-conspiracy theories, child-like wonder over the birds visiting the garden, lots of bitterness, lots of charm and tons of digressions peppered with obscure facts he'd gathered in unorthodox research, facts that sounded off but I did not challenge him on.

Ed was angry that even now, he was not getting his due. Talking about the literary market, we of course talked about Junot Diaz. We also talked about Abraham Rodriguez, about the near-extinction of Nuyorican prose writers. I knew better than to bring up Latina writers -- it would only have triggered the reflexive anti-feminismo that had gained him a bad reputation among Latina artists citywide.

The truth is, he did not get his due. Prior to any of the half-dozen "Latino booms" I've lived through, he wrote stories that refused the "when I was ethnic and poor" identity politics formula. Writers like Diaz, Rodriguez and Ernesto Quiñonez, tried to rescue his reputation, which had been buried in the 90s by his contentious relations with almost everyone in the Latino arts world when he ran the Clemente Soto Velez Center, one of the last bastions of LES Latin bohemia.

His doorstopper novel, Bill Bailey (for short), finally got him some critical acclaim in 2003. You can hear a funny interview with Leonard Lopate here.

But he kept thinking his subsequent novels, Blood Fugues and Omaha Bigelow (also for short), were even better. In this humble reader's opinion, they were not, even with their inventiveness, even with the complexity they tried to introduce to his beloved LES universe.

As my friend Marco, fellow writer and teacher, often says, Ed seriously needed an editor with a firm hand. I always read Ed's work with a virtual machete in hand. But I really appreciated how he didn't want to leave out a single word, thought, image, to render his world in its full humanity.

But now I feel like another link to that unspoken history of NY's Latin bohemia has broken. Yes, Ed was cranky and impolitic. He had alienated so many people that it took his agent a week to find out he'd died, in Lutheran hospital, alone. But Vega lived through all the fights of the 70s, 80s, 90s, the ones that get marginalized as "ethnic concerns," but really are epic struggles over whose city this is, whose stories matter, and how badly we disrespect artists.

UPDATE: Check David Gonzalez's clear-eyed, touching tribute to Ed here. David is not only a colleague and a friend, but one of the best chroniclers of Nueva York out there. There will be a memorial Monday Sept. 15, 6-8 pm at the SGI-USA Culture Center, 7 E 15th St, Manhattan.