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.

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.

Thunderdome, Dallas edition

The Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome clip above is apropos of this Dallas Morning News story detailing the cage matches that were staged at South Oak Cliff High School over a period of a couple of years for students to "resolve their differences."

The school district site doesn't detail the school's racial makeup, and sorry, I'm not familiar enough with Dallas to know, but a wikipedia entry about the school mentions that "Between 1965 and 1970 the student body changed from nearly 100 percent white to almost 100 percent African-American."

The Dallas Morning News story has a sidebar that includes the relevant pages from the report that revealed how the "cage" and fights were set up by school personnel. The principal at the time, who is alleged to have at one point condoned/encouraged the fighting, at another point is alleged to have worked to stop the fighting, saying "I don't want any of that shit... I've killed with my bare hands."

While wrestling/ultimate fighting edges into very physical theater, extreme games like "The Running Man" and "Death Race" are seeming less fantastic by the minute. Especially with so many young men of color with few productive prospects.

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.

17 Reasons Why: Gentrification isn't just a Black thing

I'm a little late on my review of Medicine for Melancholy, which I saw a few weeks ago at the Waverly IFC Center. I had some strong reactions, some of which were totally opposite to most of the reviews I've seen, even those by trusted astute writer friends like Ernest Hardy and Elisha Miranda.

I was excited to see the movie, a 24-hour romance between two Afro-bohos in my former home of San Francisco. There were superficial elements that reminded me of She's Gotta Have It (more on that movie, which I caught again recently after many many years, in a future post) -- the monochromatic palette, the quirky romance, the space for artsy Blackness to just breathe. But like most shorthand, the comparison doesn't hold too far.

First, the good: the sense of place, and the romance of place, comes through clearly. San Francisco is easy to fall for, the pretty girl at the party to whom everyone gravitates. But the beauty in the movie isn't just the usual postcard vistas, it's more the sweet alchemy of low-rise housing + hills that makes you feel apart and in nature in Potrero Hill, Dolores Park, the Palace of Fine Arts.

The movie pays careful attention to where people live, what they're likely to cross rolling from the Marina to the Tenderloin, the intimate little corners of the not-so-new-anymore Yerba Buena Arts Center, the industria-era nostalgia of the Britex Fabrics sign. I have a personal map of my own favorite Mission District signs: El Capitan (torn down), 500 Club (my beacon home biking down from the Haight), Thrift Town (17 Reasons Why).

Place is nostalgia, for a San Francisco that was less white, less uniformly rich. The figure we get from Micah (Wyatt Cenac, who turns in a great performance, tensed up in his laid-back-ness, always on the verge of breaking his Buster Keaton demeanor to laugh or rage) is 7% African-American population, with the stronghold being Bayview-Hunter Point -- the "redevelopment" of the Fillmore as the city's Black displacement original sin. All true, all a tragedy -- one that fits in nicely as evidence of The Plan (go 31:45 in for the relevant segment) -- but not the whole story.

As Micah and his paramour Jo wander the city and talktalktalk about race, romance and redevelopment, they pass by an open storefront where a group of people is discussing gentrification. I think these are played by real-life housing activists. What I noticed is that everyone talking about displacement from San Francisco to the East Bay and further inland was white. Huh?

The most intense displacement of the past decade has been in my former neighborhood of the Mission and like neighborhoods, traditionally Latino nabes. The Latino population of SF has remained more or less steady since 1990 (14% of the city even as total population has gone up and down). But those who remain are poorer and more marginalized. How do you talk about gentrification in San Francisco and have it be strictly a Black-white conversation?

And for that matter, how do you talk about "alternative culture" -- one of the other subjects of contention for our blipster protagonists -- and yet again frame it strictly in terms of Black-white? At one point, the couple hits a "Soul Night" in a club I could not place (Elbo Room?) where, retro-Daptones style, most of the revelers are figured as white.

But I spotted a few Chicano-Filipino-looking people in there. The notion that "alternative" only means "white" is a false one, at least to my memory of 1990s SF. Or maybe the polyracial omnisexual bohemia of my memories only exists in LA now.

And I haven't even talked about the straw-woman that is Jo, with her opaque life, contrarian non-politics and fuzzy personality. All we can gather about her is that she is the kept woman of a globe-trotting art dealer/curator. Her "creative side" and politics is restricted to making t-shirts sporting the names of female filmmakers. Um, yeah.

Micah's race warrior position can be compelling even against a tougher interlocutor than the one he gets. I couldn't figure out what Micah saw in Jo aside from cuteness and checkered Vans. It's almost like Micah is having an affair with the ideal of a Black alternative woman rather than a flesh-and-blood person.

I really wanted to like this movie. But as lovely as so much of it is, it left a sour taste in my mouth.

["Medicine for Melancholy" still via allmoviephoto.com; "17 Reasons Why" pix via thelab.org]

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]

Holy pochos, Batman!

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?

Who's That Knocking at My Door?

Saw an astonishing tidbit in a "Talk of the Town" piece in this week's New Yorker. Prince (yes, the Purple One) on occasion goes door-knocking in the vicinity of his Los Angeles home to proselytize with fellow Jehovah's Witnesses.

“Sometimes people act surprised, but mostly they’re really cool about it,” he said.

Makes me (almost) reconsider ignoring the buzzing on weekends. Who knows? I might run into Venus & Serena Williams, Jill Scott or Ja Rule.

[image of Prince via The New Yorker]

Way-off analysis of the gays and the browns: a wee rant

Amid all the good news last week, there was the nasty bit about the passing of Cali's Prop. 8.

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]