Sound Taste

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.

No more stuff!

I saw this coming, and yet I wish that, for once, we had not followed the trend. There is now a site called Stuff Latin People Like. (The first post is dated April 4.)

You already know what this looks like. It's the same as Stuff White People Like and Stuff Black People Love (not to be confused with Stuff Educated Black People Like), except not even mildly funny (like I thought SWPL was, until I read Gary's spot-on critique here) and not even mildly telling about nonwhites' class anxieties (the way SEBPL is).

And what do we get for the wait? Novelas (#2) Pretend Relatives (#7) and Wal Mart (#15). These barely pass the Homer Simpson test (it's funny coz it's true) and would never get past the first go-around on those email chain letters (I still occasionally get the tried-and-true "you know you're Latino/Puerto Rican/Mexican/Dominican if..." lists, with proper local slang subbed in).

As Daniel Hernandez, among many others, said about SWPL, it was a list that had more to do with class/education/tribe than race/ethnicity.

The site seems to be suffering from the Guanabee syndrome: it must have seemed like a good idea late night and drunk, but the joke cannot be sustained past the first few entries. For satire done right, visit Ask a Mexican.

[image: SLPL banner]

In praise of concón

I was thinking about rising prices of rice, cataclysmic food shortages, and the wisdom of peasant cultures while eating some Thai sticky rice this weekend.

I love sticky rice (and mochi and bibimbop) and other toothsome chewy rice-based treats because they all remind me of concón. This is literally the rice that gets stuck to the bottom of the pot.

Rather than being a culinary disaster, concón is a delicacy in the DR (In PR it is too, called pegao). To the point that some cooks purposefully cook rice so that it creates concón. (I've never quite gotten the hang of this, but I think it involves extra oil and extra fire toward the end of the cooking process.)

Like any hyper-local delicacy, there are rules:

1) It's easiest to make this in those possibly harmful aluminum round-bottomed pans commonly called calderos and available in hardware stores in Latin nabes. Do not try making it with your automatic rice cooker.

2) While it should have some color, it should not be burnt (golden to caramel, not black).

3) Texture-wise, it should be chewy to crispy, but should not threaten to chip your fillings (although some masochistic friends love just that, fighting the rice to submission).

3) It should be served separately, not mixed in with the regular rice. All the better to savor.

4) The more you can scrape from the pan in a single piece, the better. Hence why the picture below, of a pot-shaped piece of concón, is so impressive.

It makes sense that concón would also be loved in Haiti, and I know that for me the only proper bibimbop is one that has rice stuck to the bottom of the pot it's served in, but I wonder how many other rice-eating peoples love that crunchy sticky treat.

Anyone?

UPDATE: In Cuban = raspa. In Korean = nurungji. In Catalán = soccarat. In Farsi = tahdig. See, I knew it!

[concón pix via remolacha]

Latinos opened the door for gay marriage

I have to admit, I only read the headlines in California's Supreme Court gay marriage decision this week.

So I did not notice the revealing tidbit that Gary Dauphin footnoted a couple of days ago: the Supremes' decision was largely based on the 1948 case Perez v. Sharp, which challenged interracial marriage bans way before Loving v. Virgina (1967) and involved a Mexican American woman and a Black man.

The reason the couple was denied a wedding license and the case went to court was that Andrea Perez was considered "white." Gary posted her picture. I'm re-posting it here. If she's white, I'm downright Aryan.

Like Mendez v. Westminster, the school desegregation case that predated Brown v. Board of Ed by almost a decade, Perez v. Sharp was also a key precedent-setter with Latino plaintiffs that crowbarred the door open to extend fundamental civil rights to others.

Gary argues that it's no coincidence that this case (I would argue both cases) took place in the other state I consider home, California. This supports Roberto Lovato's theory that California is ground zero for Latino-led radical social change in this country.

Yet another instance in which we are erased from the history of fighting for American civil rights, human rights. Been here all along, time to make sure others notice.

The other f'd up campaign for prez

We interrupt our regularly scheduled Friday video with a note on presidential elections that have been more tedious and annoying than the one in the U.S. Dominicans are voting today for prez, and you don't have to be a genius to guess that incumbent Leonel Fernandez will be re-elected.

At this time last year, the three major parties had spent RD$409M (about US$12M) -- by now, they've probably spent ten times that amount. Among the expenses? Ads with celebrity endorsers like Vin Diesel.

One of Leonel's big initiatives in this past term (aside from the metro for the misbegotten) has been making the DR a Hollywood-friendly location. He's taken a few trips to the Dream Factory with his wife to cozy up to movie execs, spending millions from the public till.

This "work," and the fact that a long list of celebs have getaways in Cap Cana and other tropical fortresses in the vicinity, has yielded a couple of shoots -- The Good Shepherd and Miami Vice.

Now where does the muscly ex-bouncer and living video game avatar fit into all this? According to a couple of reliable sources, Vin's bio-dad is some Dominican tiguere, and he spent some time there last year getting cozy with his padre patria. That may explain my unholy attraction to him.

Diesel ran some acting and directing classes last year (don't laugh), and has talked about opening up a film school there. (What Godardian or Almodovarian or Scorscesian insights into film Diesel might offer are still a bit of a mystery, but given the current quality of Dominican-made film, it can't possibly hurt).

All of this greased and facilitated by Hollywood-craving Leonel. So payback time came around, as it did for more unambiguously Dominican celebs like merengueros, bachateros & peloteros.

There's a series of 5 Diesel spots, with overlapping material. Most have amped-up behind-the-scenes action film footage and feature various versions of the following dialogue:

"Dominicanos, que tanto quiero, que lo bueno no cambia. Para mi gente, vota por Leonel, el presidente. Es p'alante que vamos" (the last is the campaign's slogan)

Not as cool as the Obama videos Gary Dauphin wrote about this week, but hey.

Listening to Vin, it appears he's just starting to learn Spanish, but already the tigueraje seems to be rubbing off.

Tony-torn

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]

Literary insularism: a wee rant

My post last week about the diasporic-phobic intellectuals in the DR prompted some intense responses, mostly by dominicanos here and mostly in private.

But island-based poet/editor Frank Báez wrote a longish, eloquent assessment in the comments section I share with you in translation below.

When Junot came to Santo Domingo to present “Drown,” not only did people think his book was garbage, but at the reading one guy stood up and offered to punch him.

That was more than 10 years ago. Since then, Dominican intellectuals strived to destroy the book and as the years went by and Junot did not publish a follow-up they put him down.

The funny thing is that all those people who destroyed him and made fun, people I imagine sticking pins into a Junot voodoo doll, are the same who weeks ago were photographed at his side in the home of the gringo ambassador and in the National Palace, celebrating his Pulitzer. “The first Dominican Pulitzer.”

The sad thing is none of these intellectuals have written about the book. Sad, but good for some, was also his visit to the Feria del Libro in 2006 when only a handful of people went. Since everyone dissed him, some of us were able to get to know him, speak to him and stay in touch. This led to his working with our magazine Ping Pong and the journal Hermano Cerdo.

My girlfriend tells me that of the people who went to the talk at this year’s Feria del Libro, an audience of more than 300 people, only a couple of students, no more than a dozen people, had copies of Drown or Wao with them. The people who introduced him and those who asked questions used a wikipedia entry as reference. They knew nothing of his work, and asked only the most general of questions, nothing related to the books. I think that says it all.

When we talk about Dominican literary intellectuals, we still only refer to people who are no longer qualified to make those judgments by the simple fact that they do not partake of a literary life. Meaning, they’re not publishing books that are interesting, or keeping an active, thoughtful life in the literary world and media. They’re people who only attend literary cocktails, who I call coctelistas.

Did I mention media? In Santo Domingo, we no longer see literary sections in newspapers. They’ve all been dismantled. Journals are nowhere to be seen. The only presence of Dominican writers is on the internet.

I think that instead of organizing meetings that are used for tourism (which is not bad in and of itself), it would be more fruitful to find a way for literary projects here and there to get to know each other. Let’s translate, and edit good books.

For example, we could do one called “La Isla Entera” (The Whole Island) where Dominicans from all places can write. Not just the ones on the island, but the ones in the U.S., in Spain, Holland, Argentina, etc. An anthology to pull all those folks together.

Title aside (which to me implies that it should include work from Haitian writers), I love this project. Anyone who wants to give me or Frank names of folks who should be in there can do so by emailing me via this site, or him at his site.

Racial politics of kiddie TV: The Electric Company

I had a bicultural childhood, spent mostly in the DR, but with yearly visits to Queens, where I gorged on Cocoa Pebbles and Underdog. For learning English, Sesame Street and other "educational programs" were key. So the news that PBS is reviving "Electric Company" brought back a lot of fond memories.

The show, which ran 1971-1977, was supposed to be the follow-up, age-wise, to Sesame Street. Like Sesame Street, TEC was set in a sort of multiculti utopia. Even when the characters were not racial minorities, the idea of tolerating difference and alternative cultures was always implied.

But I had totally forgotten that Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno were both regular members of the cast. Cuban character actor Luis Avalos, Bill Cosby and Irene Cara (as a pre-teen member of the Short Circus) also had recurring roles.

Here is the first version of the show intro, very groovy, op art and full of early video f/x.

And here is a hip song featuring Rita as "Millie the helper," built around her trademark yell that was used to open the show: "Hey you guys!" It was one of the only times in her career she was allowed to play against the Latin spitfire type, and allowed to be funny.

And here is Morgan Freeman performing a song worthy of Screamin Jay Hawkins, "I Love to Take a Bath in a Casket." One of Morgan's recurring characters was called "Easy Reader," an Afro'd hep cat, part bebop, part beat, who dug the books.

If the soundtrack of the original show, and the sensibility, was funk and salsa, the new show will of course have a hip hop vibe to it. It only makes sense.

What's going to be interesting is seeing how "Electric Company," which was very focused on the old-fashioned skills of phonics and making reading cool, will fare compared to the juggernaut of Dora the Explorer and newer, browner kids' TV in the Nick-Noggin-Cartoon Network universe.

UPDATE: I didn't have time to do more intensive research on the music attached to the show, but do check this post on the 1972 cast recording with some of the original music. (thanks for the heads up, Dan!) I keep wondering: Is Joe Raposo, the show's musical director for the first three seasons, Latino or Italian?

Friday Go Gos

When I first started this blog, I thought I'd stick to my public writer's persona. But slowly, my dear readers, you have been finding out about my obsessions with accordions, with lucha libre, with Kal Penn.

And now, another confession: before I was a punk, I was a preteen lover of new wave. Bow Wow Wow, Adam Ant, Depeche Mode. And no band did I love more than the Go Gos.

Listening to them recently, I was shocked at how good some of the songs in Beauty and the Beat are. I especially love "Lust to Love," "This Town" and the eternal teen heartbreak of "How Much More." God bless Jane Wieldin's guitar.

Though I didn't know it in 1982, the band had both punk and Latin roots. Under the name Dottie Danger, full-cheeked Belinda Carlisle sang for the Germs for a bit, and two of the original members of the band had suspiciously Chicano-sounding names: Margot Olaverra (bass) and Elissa Bello (drums). Any more details from your files on the Secret History of Latinos, Jim?

In the past few years, there's been more examination of the Latin role in the LA punk scene, in this book, this exhibit and this one. I've only seen the American Sabor exhibit and don't have Spitz's book. But I assure you this subject'll be part of my summer research.

So, for that punk-new wave link (and to see how nicely these gals' looks have held up), here's a recent live cover of the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated." (Sorry, embedding was disabled.)

And below they perform "Has the Whole World Lost Its Head?" in Tops of the Pops in 1995. The song, which sounds like vintage Go-Gos (and that's a good thing) was one of three originals in the 1994 2-disc retrospective Return to the Valley of the Go-Go's.

Junot in Dominilandia

I swear I don't have a Junot obsession, and that he doesn't pay me to promote him. But it's not every day a Dominican writer is top literary news in the U.S. When the next one (and the one after that) hits, I'll be there too.

I was curious about how he was received in the DR post-prize. Last week he was one of two featured guests (the other was Derek Walcott) at the Feria del Libro, the country's annual book fair.

When Drown came out and he visited the island, he was as roundly trashed as Julia Alvarez was, for the same stupid reasons those of us living in English are: we've been away too long, we write in English, we write about cultural references they don't get, we're not obsessed enough with Trujillo, and if we are, we get our facts wrong. Nuyoricans can chime in any time.

I wondered if the AngloAmerican literary establishment's seal of approval would change things.

Media reports like this one and this one mostly stuck to the facts: he was there, he was controversial, everyone wanted to kiss his ass. The Listin Diario gave more space to announcing he'd be attending a lunch with the U.S. ambassador than to anything he said. And he was named Literary Ambassador of the Dominican Republic. Um. Yeah. Whatever.

The pull-quote of choice was a good 'un: "Dominican racism prepared me quite well for dealing with racism in the U.S." He shared an anecdote about being kept out of a nice Dominican club a few years back for being too dark.

Other remarks that appeared in press accounts which I suspect hit DR audiences a little hard were his comment that when he hears late dictator lite Joaquín Balaguer called "the genius of the people," "I die laughing."

Film/video editor Harold Martinez was at the talk, and shared some quick comments (we'll update with a more thorough account once he sends it in). He said that for the Dominican literary and political establishment, Junot is "almost an alien" and that "many criollos are pissed because he's not, according to them, Dominican."

The book, the Pulitzer, the visit and the reaction to it in the DR, said Harold, "has just raised the bar in terms of how much we [are] separate from each other...The one's born and raised in the motherland, vs the one's raised in the united."

At the Dominican Studies Association conference last week, I think the same day that Junot spoke in the DR, CUNY trustee Hugo Morales suggested we have an encuentro between island-based writers and diaspora writers. In theory, it's a great idea, but in this world, I have no interest in such a meeting.

We in the diaspora have the vantage point that lets us see links across countries, past superceded rivalries, down to the rooted structure of common oppressions. And many of us have lost our patience with educating a puny intellectual bourgeoisie that sees us as desecho rather than the future.

An exchange like that Morales proposes already happened, in 2001, thanks to a Rockefeller grant secured by Prof. Silvio Torres-Saillant. While Dominican intellectuals were happy to travel to the US on the foundation dime, they did not support the U.S. folks when they traveled to the island. No, thanks.

On the other hand, I do have hopes for the younger generation. As I've noted here, they are not as rigid about distinguishing between aquí y allá, possibly because many of them have moved back and forth. Strengthening those ties would be a more fruitful project.

[Feria del Libro pix via El Nacional; Leonel/Balaguer pix via britannica.com]