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]
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.
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 while ago, I wrote about how cassettes are still a viable format in some places outside the U.S.
Last week, I found a place in NYC where that's also true.
Walking down Moore St., in the last holdout of old-school Boricuosity in hipster-infested Williamsburg, I stopped by one of my fave record stores, Johnny Albino's. Here is what I saw:
Click on the pix to enlarge it, but the two key elements are these: the sign saying "$1 each cassettes" and the stacks and stacks below.
Johnny Albino's is one of the last salsa middens in the city (Casa Amadeo in the Bronx and Casa Latina in El Barrio are two other ones holding out). Not only does it have a great cross-section of old-school salsa and merengue, and one of the funkiest boogaloo one-off selections (Albino himself was a trío singer back in the 40s and 50s), but it has concert DVDs, new stuff -- reggaetón and local groups like Yerbabuena. But really, what you go there for is to excavate.
There was lots of stuff I recognized in the cassettes -- La Lupe, Trio Reynoso, Milly y Los Vecinos -- and some crazy-looking stuff that had me salivating, from the days when you could tell a record by its cover.
There were hundreds of tapes, an assortment of close to a hundred different recordings. "You should see the boxes I have back there, unopened!" said Johnny.
So, who the heck buys these? Johnny said that cassette buyers fell into the following categories:
1) folks who never swapped out the cassette player from their cars; 2) old folks who never quite got used to that new-fangled shiny disky thing; 3) fans who know how rare some of these are and buy the tapes to transfer them to digital.
Makes sense. I have nothing I can play these on, but I am tempted to go back and drop an Andrew Jackson. I mean, each of these cassettes is only one cent more than a single song on iTunes.
June is accordion month, so get ready for posts full of squeezebox goodness throughout the month.
For starters, check this video preview of the Smithsonian doc "Accordion Kings: the Story of Colombian Vallenato Music" (sorry, embedding was not an option). The segment highlights Yemie Arrieta Ramos, a young girl (she looks no more than 9) who was the first woman ever to win the Valledupar Vallenato Kings Festival.
When she starts attending the Turco Gil Academy, which according to the clip, has taught some 2,000 kids traditional vallenato over the last two decades, her father tells her she's picked a "man's instrument" and has to forget she's a girl.
She says, "A woman does not have a man's ability." I winced a little at that, but waddayagonnado? At least they let her play, and she kicks ass.
She and her pint-size accompanists (including the smokin' Alejandro on percussion) totally win over the crowd, and it's really mesmerizing to see her zone out, leaning her cheek against the accordion, eyes closed.
If you're in DC June 6, you can catch a free screening of the doc. Otherwise, you can read a bit more about it here.
Also check this video of five-time Vallenato King Hugo Carlos Granado at last year's festival, singing "La puya rebelde."
The Tony nominations announced on Tuesday have me in a pickle. I am, improbably, cheering for not one, but two musicals.
In the Heights amazingly received the most nominations of any of this year's contenders, 13 total. I wasn't as wowed by it as everyone else was, mostly because I like my entertainment a little darker.
But I know how rare it is for a Latino-made play about Latinos to make it on Broadway. It's only happened a handful of times before: Short Eyes (which won an Obie and was nominated for six Tonys), Zoot Suit, Freak (which lost the Tony to "Art" as best play in 1998).
In the Heights is bubbly, and carried by the lightness and bounce of Lin Manuel Miranda. The other actors are uniformly kinetic and sweet. And the songs are not what you'd hear in the Copa, but hey, this is musical theater. And I do appreciate the break this play represents from the rut of portraying Latinos as always already only being involved in drugs-prison-gangs. (Although the curmudgeon in me wonders if the appeal to whites isn't a hunger to see happy darkies.)
And then there's Passing Strange. I am still kicking myself for missing the original run at the Public Theater, but I was blown away when I saw it at the Belasco, which still felt as close to a cabaret as a biggish theater can. As I wrote about here, it hit a deep chord in me (and in a lot of my other artist/intellectual/bohemian friends) as an accurate portrayal of our journeys to the Real.
The two plays are head to head in every category inn which Passing Strange is nominated (it has a total of 7 nominations). I'm just hoping for some kind of Salomonic solution. I mean, their main competition is Xanadu and Cry-Baby (how in the hell did that wonderful pervert John Waters become a preferred Broadway musical source?).
[Lin Manuel pix via Moxie the Maven; Passing Strange pix via variety.com]
Maybe it just means I'm getting that much closer to death myself, but I feel like too many of the imprescindibles are leaving us these days. Martinican poet and revolutionary (valga la redundancia) Aimé Césaire died today in the island's capital Fort de France.
At 94, Césaire was around to see, and help bring about, the decolonization of his homeland, of Algeria (he was Frantz Fanon's mentor), the Black Power and Pan-Africanist movements. Not all those enterprises worked out perfectly, but they were still essential in moving realities.
He helped draft the legislation that turned France's Caribbean colonies into départments d'outre-mer and represented Martinique in French National Assembly. Representing the Communist Party, he was mayor of Fort de France from 1945 until 2001. Himself to the end, last year he refused to meet with Nicholas Sarkozy for his colonialist positions, instead supporting Ségolène Royal.
Reading Césaire's work as a graduate student opened up so many things for me: thinking of the tropics as a source of knowledge (not just a shadow of EuroAmerican originality), finding that punk spirit of creation-in-destruction in his quest for a new language to properly describe new realities, knowing that home and the world are not separate things, and that a lifetime's sustained fight for liberty is a worthy endeavor, even for a writer of ephemeral things.
Check a multimedia (image/sound) homage funded by UNESCO featuring work inspired by Césaire's universe and images. Love this quote from Césaire for the "necessary utopias" section:
Liberty is an act, a fruit. It is nothing more than actualization without end. At the end of the 20th Century, it is nothing more than a serene dream. Ideologies, with their heavy certainties, have shown their limits. Does the need for utopia reside in us, like a hardheaded dream? (My trans.)
Césaire is for me an example of how crucial it is for us to see how splitting the atom of language can happen even from a tiny island. Or rather, that the best views of the world as it is and as it can be only ever really happen from some sort of tiny island, or forgotten hill or lonely desert.
[pix of Césaire young, with Francois Mitterand and by the Caribbean via www.matinikphoto.com]
Enough bitching. Time to praise and ponder. If you're looking for models on how to join art, fun, genre, social consciousness, multimedia and brown power, you could do worse than the collective/business Sister Outsider Entertainment.
This ad/venture started by Elisha Miranda and Sofía Quintero (not their first; they also started Chica Luna in E Harlem) does more things that I can do justice to in a single blog post. But let me start with this shocking fact: it runs in the black -- a miracle for any cultural enterprise -- by smartly mixing profit-generating services with its more educational/artistic/empowerment projects.
They produce and promote films/TV, books and theater that addresses issues of women of color -- all colors, all national origins, all sexual persuasions, but with a definite bent to hip hop sensibility. Nice to see brown all over the production teams as well as the subject matter.
Under the aliases E-Fierce and Black Artemis, respectively, Elisha and Sofia have put out books that are "street lit" without the misogyny and homophobia, "chica lit" without the neck-poppin' and chola-istic clichés, unafraid of erotica, cross-ages appeal and not diluting to the lowest common denominator. A couple of years ago, I really enjoyed Sista Hood (sorry I never got to do the story I promised, Elisha!) and am looking forward to checking the rest of the Sister Outsider library.
If you want an up-close and personal look at this multimedia powerhouse in action, check this event tonight, promoting a curriculum guide (and I'm sure, a pedagogical theory for liberation) based on the collective's books:
NYU Author Book Release Party
Conscious Women Rock the Page Using Hip-Hop Fiction to Incite Social Change
Black Artemis aka Sofia Quintero, E-Fierce aka Elisha Miranda, Jlove aka Jennifer Calderon and Marcella
Wednesday, April 16, 6:00-9:00 PM The Center for Multicultural Education and Programs Kimmel Center, Suite 806 (60 Washington Square South)
It's free, with a wine and cheese reception afterward. Prepare to be wowed.
I'm on the trail of some electro-gagá, but in the meantime, I've been listening to this duet straddling the Canal de la Mona.
I'm really sorry I missed these ladies when they were at the Nacotheque event last week. But according to their MySpace page, they'll be back in July.
They're playing around with the repetitiveness of 90s merengue, gagá and other popular Dominican musics, the implied absurdity of tropical tropes and rhymes, and the scary sexuality of Chicas del Can vintage high-voiced singing.
I love their song "Darte" with the refrain, "lo que quiero es darte, lo que quiero es darte, lo que quiero es darte complejos," like some demented psychotherapy/merengue/minimalist art project. I've always had a weakness for art-school bands.
The only YouTube trace I found of them is this "Miti Miti Puppy" piece. Is it a riff on "perreo"? Is it a ñato-pride song? Is it self-indulgent arty shit? Maybe all of the above.
The ides of March came and went and no empires were toppled (unless you count Spitzer's). This also means that we're more than halfway through Women's History Month, and I think it's about time I caught up to it.
The images below are from an exhibit that went up this time last year in Parque Independencia in the DR. The series of portraits by Nicole Sánchez, which were blown up to something like 8' x 10' and hung all around park's peripheral fence, shows Dominican women who are famous and common.
From Dedé & Minou Mirabal to MIlly Quezada to a general in full uniform to prominent journalists, artists, writers and musicians to the entire national volleyball team, construction workers, cops and pilots and flower sellers and casabe makers, all are spectacular.
You can see all the portraits in the series here. I highly recommend using the slideshow option, though you lose the captions that way.
According to an interview Sánchez did with Listín Diario, the project goes beyond the photos to include videos and a book with interviews getting the perspectives of 100 women. Looking forward to seeing more.
[Portraits of Paula Bautista, Marisol Chalas, Irka Mateo and the national volleyball team via Nicole Sánchez's Flickr page]
p.s. Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of Sound Taste. Be on the lookout for design changes and a couple of subtle shifts in content. But no worries, my obsessions are pretty steady and predictable, so you'll continue to hear about Harold & Kumar, the Red Hook Ball Fields food vendors, and merengue de la calle.
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.
