Ken Burns Hates Mexicans

Live! From Guadalajara, Mexico...

Vexing: Female Voices from the East L.A. Punk, just opened last night in Guadalajara, Mexico, as part of the city's big annual bookfair. This current edition of Vexing, a hybrid show of historical objects and contemporary art, film and video, is an encore presentation from the original exhibit held last year at the Claremont Musuem of Art.

I have a couple of films in the show, was at the opening, rubbed shoulders with L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (who, I discovered, like most Hollywood actors, is way shorter in person), and met legendary punk rockers Alice Bags and Teresa Covarrubias. Interesting show. Free champagne in real glass flutes. Met a bass player from a Journey tribute band AND a guitar player and drummer from a Kiss tribute band -- all of them female. Ran into artist Shizu Saldamando. Great night.

Tonight is an outdoor concert featuring the Sirens, straight outta Highland Park, LA; Chicana punk rock supergroup Las Tres; and Lysa Flores. Pics to come. Until then, here's a video about the OG Vexing show starring my fave Pflugerville academic Colin Gunkel.

UPDATE: Turns out Colin's been blogging all week about the Vexing show...photos, videos, commentary. Here's a clip from the opening where the camera walks through the rooms. That's me, by the way, at 0:17 talking to Lysa Flores. Antonio Villaraigosa is nowhere to be seen.

Vexing in Guadalajara - From the Archives

Ask your average rock fan about the origins of Punk and they will most likely think of England, the Sex Pistols, and God Save the Queen. Dig a bit deeper and their thoughts may cross the Atlantic over to CBGBs, the Ramones, and the dynamic 70s New York scene. When pressed further, only a few of these average rock fans will make the mind trip cross-country and mention the L.A. scene of Darby Crash, X, and West Coast punk in general. And for said average rock fan to imagine Raza in this Hollywood mix of mohawks and nihilistic self-expression?, forget about it. When the historical L.A. scene is remembered, if at all, the Ken Burns Effect operates in full simplistic and reductive force: West Coast/LA punk is considered a white boy thing with nary a person of color about.

And of course that notion is wrong.

Like with most American cultural movements in the last fifty years, throw a rock at it and you'll hit a Mexican. The So Cal punk rock scene was no different.

Don't get me started on the bands of brown youth infusing the scene, I could catalog and pontificate for days: the Plugz, Los Illegals, the Brat, Thee Undertakers, Alice Bags and the Bags (real name Alicia Armandariz -- and featured in the photo above), a pre-El Vez Robert Lopez and his Chula Vista band the Zeros, and up in the Bay Area Alejandro Escovedo and his SF band the Nuns (who opened for the Sex Pistols at the English band's infamous last show at the Winterland.) The list goes on and on and the influence and impact of the bands incalculable. Just last year doing research on San Antonio alt bands for a TV show, I stumbled across a sizable group of 18 to 20ish Mexican American punk rockers not only familiar with the early brown L.A. punk bands and avid collectors of the scene's long out-of-date LPs and articles, but the kids were home-grown post-colonial experts on the subcultural history of the bands. A surprising feat considering these Tejano kids living two time zones away and born decades later. Voices carry indeed.

Which brings me to the latest edition of the LA Weekly and their cover story on the "the birth of Los Angeles Punk." The piece takes as its focus the Hollywood punk rock club the Masque, which the article describes as "a literal hothouse in which about a hundred punks briefly bloomed, with their messy assignations and brash experiments in volume and nihilism in the late-’70s merging into one great big purifying brushfire that consumed the worlds of music, art and fashion." Of course I quickly went through the piece curious to see if the Ken Burns Effect informed the article. Trouble was, there was not a lot of there, there. Written in conjunction with the release of a photo book - Live at the Masque: Nightmare in Punk Alley -- the piece, not surprisingly, lacked any kind of historical depth and subsequent analysis. It was more press release than well-researched article.

For something more substantial we have to go back to this 2003 article in Los Angeles Magazine by Josh Kun on another famous L.A. punk club, the Vex, "an oasis for Eastside punk bands who were tired of hustling for gigs on the Westside," deep in the heart of East L.A:

The story of L.A. punk has long been the story of punk west of the L.A. River. Penelope Spheeris's 1981 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, released when the Vex was in full swing, ignored the Chicano contingent completely. More recent histories of the scene, like Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen's We Got the Neutron Bomb, treat it like it was treated back in the day, as one of punk's unincorporated ghettos, marginal barrio music with permanent residence in history's footnotes.

"I always felt that our scene was invisible and unrecognized," says [Willie] Herron. "It wasn't anything that many other bands or writers were interested in. When they would review our shows, they just didn't get it. We had to remain in the shadows. We couldn't be ourselves and represent the East L.A. we knew. We couldn't be white punkers, and we didn't want to be white punkers. We were trying to come up with our sound."

For more alternative history on L.A. Chicanos punk, KCET posts L.A. artist Diane Gamboa's black and white photo documentation of the scene at their website here, along with Marisela Norte's thought on the Vex, as well as mp3 downloads of a couple of Brat songs.

And finally, I leave you with a few video clips...see the Plugz perform Jokerman with Bob Dylan on a 1984 David Letterman appearance here. The Brat live at Plaza de la Raza here. Alice Bags live at the Troubadour in 1978 here. And in a where-are-they-now clip, here's the Plugz at their Echoplex reunion show this past weekend.

Originally posted November, 2007

Is Thanksgiving a White Holiday?

Long Thanksgiving weekend ahead. And, yes, I do celebrate the holiday, if by "celebrate" you mean eat turkey, hang out with family, and watch the Dallas Cowboys. But since I pretty much work from home the concept of "taking the day off" is sort of moot. Ni modo...

Interesting discussion going on over at Guanabee.com where skeptical raza are furiously debating whether or not Thanksgiving is a "white" holiday, and thus, be definition, a dorky celebration open to scorn, befuddlement, and bemused Latino estrangement. Set aside for a moment what is meant by "white"-- since that's a whole semiotic and cultural thicket worthy of someone's ethnic studies dissertation and not a mere blog post -- but the issues raised in analyzing the holiday are, for me, fascinating.

First of all, Guanabee.com is great. I read it everyday. It makes me laugh. I love the tone. And even better, on occasion, amidst the well-written snark, funny Wilmer Valderrama put-downs, and comedically suspect right-wingish pokes at Latin American lefty strong men (Castro, Chavez, and Che), there emerges from the posts and comments section insight into All Things Brown and contemporary. The "Is Thansgiving White?" flareup, and the post's subsequent comments, a case in point.

The tendency by some of the commentators to reduce an American ritual circa 2007 as "white" is as lazy and simplistic as doc filmmaker Ken Burns reducing the discussion of race in this country as a Black/White thing. Thanksgiving, like most cultural events in the United States, is actually transformed by the ongoing Latino participation from its gringo, Norman Rockwell origins to something more complicated.

I mean, try telling a couple of biker-looking, 250 lb., 4th gen Tejano's standing in line at the HEB with their 20 packs of Bud Light and Tony Romo Cowboy jerseys as they stock up for the holiday that they are being "white." Thanksgiving for these vatos is a four-day weekend, Butterball turkey, Tia Nesta's pinto beans next to the cranberry sauce, from a can, and kicking back with tios, tias, and cousin Esperanza's gabacho boyfriend from college named Jeff, but he's cool, since his gringo throwing-arm is an athletic talent highly coveted during the annual touch football game held in the street every year after dinner.

Raza Thansgiving Anxiety, I'm thinking, doesn't break down into a Brown/White thing, but rather, I suspect, into an immigrant vs. homegrown thing. And being "immigrant" -- as old school Nuyoricans and 3rd and 4th gen Mexican Americans all across Aztlan will tell you -- doesn't necessarily define all that is to be Latino. Granted, that's not to say the sight of a giant Underdog balloon at the Macy's parade probably isn't a bit strange to a Oaxacan food vendor newly transplanted to New York.

(It must be like how I felt when was in D.F. during the World Cup and witnessed hordes of happy drunk Mexican soccer fans scampering up the El Ángel de la Independencia to pee on the monument's eternal flame. Bewildered. Or the way I feel when forced to watch El Chavo de Ocho at the laundromat on Sunset, I mean, I understand it's supposed to be a comedy -- actors mug for the camera and a laugh track points out the punchlines -- but for warm and fuzzy childhood memories of after school TV delight give me Gilligan's Island any day.)

But back to turkey day. Ultimately, there is value in the scrutiny of Thanksgiving. Kind of makes you think about U.S holidays in general and why we recognize the events and how we celebrate them. Is Memorial Day a "white" holiday given the overwhelming number of raza veterans dying for a country that for years discriminated against them? Is the Fourth of July a "white" holiday? How about Cinco de Mayo, especially as practiced and sponsored by U.S. beer companies. And finally, of course, a consistent immigrant observation/critique of Thanksgiving points out the problematic Pilgrim - Indian origins of the holiday given the subsequent genocide of Native Americans. What's up with that?, they might say. A useful question. And while I don't have the answer, at the end of the day, I welcome the examination.

Originally posted November, 2007.

Video of the Day

From the infamous 1981 cult movie classic Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains. Herny Rollins played this tune on his KCRW radio show tonight in honor of  L.A. 70s era Punk Rock pioneer Brendan Mullen, obit here. Black Randy and the Metro Sqaud...

Image of the Day

Irving Penn, badass photographer. June 16, 1917 – October 7, 2009.

 

 

Video of the Day

What to say about the Zeros?: part of the American contingent of mad Punk Rock inventors; band members going on to fold spindle and recreate pop music for decades; and, of course, Brown Like Me.

The Zeros 30th Aniversary Tour Trailer

Does ABC's 'Modern Family' Hate Mexicans?

Was all set to blog about the dreaded Texas Rangers (the police force, not the baseball team), when I came across a scathing review of the new ABC TV show Modern Family. Seems my fellow raza in New York didn't like the new sitcom as much as I did, in fact they absolutely hated it, articulating their reasoned position and thoughtful critique with lines such as "fetid shitstorm," "loathsome," "oh Jesus Fucking Christ," and not just one "Ugh!" but two, the second in all caps. Wow. Were we watching the same show?

For those without TiVo and who, presumably, spend their cultured evenings reading books and going to the cinema, Modern Family is a single-camera sitcom, faux doc style, a la The Office, about three contemporary suburban families: one "traditional," one gay, the last a second marriage between an older white guy and a younger Latina with a kid named Manny. Seems the depiction of Manny's father, Javier the Latino (Guanabee.com's words, not mine), the "deadbeat dad" who didn't take his kid to Disneyland (pobrecito!), really upset the folks in New York. Setting aside the fact that Javier the Latino is actually Javier the Implied Latino Who Is Only Talked About And Never Actually Seen, their main beef with the show seems to be offensive stereotypes and what they see as boring, one-dimensional characters. I disagree.

To cherry pick and then highlight the so-called faults of only the Latino characters ("deadbeat dad") while not acknowledging equally offensive faults given to white characters (being racist, for instance) misses the point of the show entirely and makes for a disingenuous review. EVERYONE is held up for scrutiny, ridicule, and, consequently, complexity. Gays, cranky old gringo grandfathers, infantile white dads, Colombian trophy wives: they all receive, with equal opportunity of offensiveness, the same satirical treatment. What makes the show interesting, besides the funny writing, great acting, and the innovative way the writer's use and then subvert stereotypes, is including a Brown element to what has pretty much been a white depiction of what it means to be an "American" sit-com family. It's an organic inclusion, so far, that doesn't relegate Latinos to second-tier status, nor condescend to them with sappy PC reverence (you know, where their humble, hat-in-hand, immigrant asses get saved by the white guy).

Latinos-Who-Care-About-Such-Things complain when we're cast in movies and TV as maids and gangbangers. Fine. I do too. But to then complain that the few attempts at complex depictions are characters not all noble and without blemish is trying to have it both ways.

Sofia Vergara in particular, should be singled out for her performance as Gloria, the hot Latina trophy wife. Vergara takes the usual and tired depictions of TV Latinas, knowingly embraces the cultural stereotypes, and then spins them on their head in, yes, brassy assertions of power and pride. Very badass. And regarding Vergara's part in the abysmal Chasing Papi? All is forgiven. 

Go here for a review that applauds the gay representations in the show, for positive industry review go here, and for the Metacritics view go here.

Eat to the Beat

According to Guanabee.com, the source for contemporary Cuban-American pop culture news, the New Jersey School board has canceled an upcoming concert at the Union City High School by someone named CuCu Diamantes, who I'm guessing is a singer of some importance since she has a website, performed for the Obama inauguration (albeit in the de facto second-tier "Latino Inaugural Gala"), and, finally, was nominated for a Latin Grammy.

But come to think of it, who hasn't been nominated for a Latin Grammy? But that's a whole other blog post. You get the picture: homegirl is famous in certain circles.

Apparently so much so that angry Cuban-Americans don't want the singer to appear in front of their children. CuCu, it seems, sang in Cuba last week...in public...(cue Crickets SFX)...and, well, yeah, I don't get it either. But who am I to talk? Back in my home state of Texas the lunatic fringe over there was leading the national fight to stop Obama from telling kids to study hard and stay in school.

So in these politically complicated times let us turn to a simpler and more rocking Union City. From Blondie, circa 1979, the year the Sandanistas overthrew Somoza and Fidel was there cheering them on, issues with more weight than, say, pop stars lip-synching in the school quad, I leave you with one badass music video (I am sooo jealous of that opening helicopter shot), "Union City Blue"...

Video of the Day

Blue Means Go is a new fave band of mine. And not just because they are straight outta San Antonio.

Girl in a Coma fans will recognize singer Carly Garza from back in the day when she used to sing a duet with GIAC impersonating a French/German/or Polish foreign exchange student with appropriate fake accent.

Carly's always had an amazing voice but when the band's drummer recently quit and Garza stepped in to provide the beat AND keep up with the lead vocals, Blue Means Go became something special and way interesting. 

Image of the Day

SF artist Rio Yanez is a badass. Not only does he have one of the best blogs around, but his art and ongoing projects always dazzle. Check out this recent interview with Rio on Anyguey...

Scooped by Junior

Occasionally, Ruben Navarette Jr., perennial KBHM Wet Burrito Award winner, gets it right. Not only does his column on George Strait and the country singer's new cover of the classic Mexican song El Rey offer interesting context and well-deserved shout outs to Freddy Fender and Johnny Rodriguez, but the Harvard Homeboy scooped me in my own backyard. San Antonian George Strait singing a song in Spanish?! I can't believe I didn't know this already. Guess I've been hanging in Echo Park too much lately. In any case here are a couple of renditions of the song, the first by Strait, and a classic Vicente Fernandez version. Gracias, Ruben...

Right Wing Nuts Read Ken Burns Hates Mexicans

As mentioned last week, I've been away from consistent KenBurnsHatesMexicans blogging for the past couple of months. Consequently, my readers, modest as they were, drifted away (I mean, really: how many Spurs-loving, Metal-obsessed, Navarette-hating, pop-cultural engrossed self-exiled Tejanos are out there?). As a result the numbers of page hits for KBHM has taken a slight downturn.

That is until Friday. That day, the hits more than tripled.

What tha--?! Now, unless the general public has taken a sudden interest in, say, Question Mark and Mysterians and their rightful place in US pop music history, something had to be wrong.

Most visitors to KenBurns simply type in the KenBurns url which takes them to the site you're reading now. Others click in from links that may mention a particular post I've written, links from my Facebook page, blasts from my Twitter account, etc etc. Because my fancy Typepad blog service allows me to check and see from what site a visitor has clicked from, I can trace links back to see who's been interested in my posting of the Richard Avedon portrait of Cesar Chavez or one of my latest music videos. Imagine my surprise when I discovered most of these new visitors that Friday were coming from the right wing web site Freerepublic.org.

What tha--? Now, unless right wing nut jobs had taken a sudden interest in --...oh well, you get the point. This was weird.

I clicked to see the original link. Turns out it was from a link someone named Blam left on the comment section of a small article on how Henry Cisneros, ex mayor of San Antonio, ex Secretary of Housing and Urban development, had been hired by ACORN to restore their image.

(Now I realize Henry was once the golden boy of Mexican American pols way back in the day, but even Sizzlin' Hank, "the Chicano Cary Grant" -- my personal nickname for the still charismatic vato; I once sat behind him at a Spurs game and believe me, it WAS like begin in the presence of a movie star -- even ol' Henry was going to have a hard time rehabilitating the image of the troubled community organizing group. But that's a whole other story...)

What was making me mad as I read the other comments to the Cisneros/ACORN article -- things like "one crook helping another crook," references to Henry as "a tax cheat, perjurer, and adulterer," and something about Cisneros being familiar with Ho's -- was that this guy, Blam, was using a ten-year old article I wrote on Cisneros to bolster his right-wing case for bashing Cisneros.

This ad hominem point of view could not be farther from the intent of my original piece. Sure, I outlined the mistakes and indiscretions of Cisneros, but there was a context. My main point was two-fold: 1) to illustrate the significance of Henry's career in the mid-80s, an importance largely forgotten by the time the article was written; and 2) to point out the fact that there was no Latino politician at the time who mattered on a national level.

Anyway, just wanted to set the record straight. Henry if you're reading this I still got your back.

Image of the Day

San Antonio photographer Mari Hernandez' show, "Chutter," opened last week. Go here for more of her distorted and/or deconstructed lowrider images, and her way cool San Anto blog.

Woulda Coulda Shoulda

Interesting Bill Cosby interview over at The Root. Turns out Cosby's Heathcliff Huxtable character, the all-knowing, college-educated, African-American TV doctor, was originally supposed to be a chauffeur, a more working-class depiction of black life than was ultimately broadcast.

Not only that, but Cliff's wife Clair was originally written as Dominican, with Spanish-speaking-only parents. Apparently a lot of the show's humor was going to come from Cliff's inability to understand the conjugating in-laws, kinda like how it was supposed to be funny the times Ricky Ricardo got mad and spewed those angry Spanish monologues to a bewildered Lucy (and sometimes Fred and Ethyl)  in 'I Love Lucy.' Given the possibilities in this imagined Dominican mixed marriage I'm guessing there would've also be many jokes concerning plantains too, but then again I'm a Mexican-American from Texas and just hearing hearing the very strange word "plantain" said aloud makes me laugh all the time.

In any case, as everyone who's seen the show knows, the network avoided the pesky messiness of Huxtable multiculturalism, everyone stayed black, and presented to America a then (and still) ground-breaking depiction of a bourgeois and upper class black family. This of course begs the question: Did the Bill Cosby Show and its eight seasons of teachable moments make blacks less threatening for white America and lead the way for Barack Obama and his historical presidency? Go to the interview and see what Bill thinks.

Me, I subscribe to the Matt Santos theory as leading to Obama's Presidency. Matt Santos, of course, was the Mexican American character played by Jimmy Smits who ran for, and won, the U.S. Presidency in The West Wing TV show. The similarities between the fictional Santos and Obama are striking. This is no surprise since the writers of the show, when developing the minority character and his quixotic run for the White House went to David Axlerod, Obama's long-time adviser, for research in imagining such a character. Want proof? Check this out...

How My Mind Sometimes Works

So I'm reading the Sunday Times, two days late, Arts Section, p 19, the Playlist, Jon Caramanica's list of newly released CDs. I'm immediately attracted to a picture of one of the reviewed bands, three guys (one of them a girl?), all wearing eyeshadow, the guy in the middle -- pencil mustache, curly black hair, olive skin -- looking vaguely Latino. Ironically so. Hm. Now this looks interesting...

The band is called the Darlings... [not really..see below.]

But just like that I start reading about the Girls, another band reviewed, because the copy says they're from San Francisco and I used to live there, and miss the city almost ever day.  The Girls' album, Mr. Caramanica says, is "flayed and ragged and hazy...underneath the slop lies terrific instincts for clean, artful melody...one of the year's best pop releases." I go to the band's Myspace page. Check out their tour dates (the Troubadour in L.A. on December 5, badass, gotta remember and buy tickets), when I see the band is also playing at the legendary El Macombo in Toronto, Canada.

The El Macombo! Crazy. I know about that club. Not that I've ever been to Canada, but when I was a teenager I remember seeing April Wine, Live at the El Macombo at a used record store. I wasn't a fan of the Canadian classic rockers but for some reason the album's title and artwork stayed with me. So I went to the YouTube...and yup, found a video of the band.

Oh, and for those Latinos Who Care About Such Things, the singer from the Darlings? Not of La Raza Cosmica at all. Gringo. Oh well, nobody's perfect. Happy Diez y Seis.

CORRECTION: I have been informed by an astute reader that the above band is not the Darlings, but is in fact, MEN, myspace here. I stand corrected. But all the other stuff, you know, how the guy looks Latino etc, pretty much the same.

Image of the Day

Been taking some photos again lately. Here are a few images from hanging out with the Alamo City Rollergirls. They rock.

 

 

Any Requests?

As Girl in a Coma prepares for their upcoming Fall national tour (dates here), the San Antonio band is asking fans for suggestions for a cover song to play they will play live on their cross-country shows. Go to band's Twitter page to make your suggestions.

I love cover songs. Not only does it give insight into a band's thinking and influences, but oftentimes, when it's done right, the new interpretation give fresh meaning to what once was familiar. One of the best songs on Trio B.C., GIAC's latest CD, is Ven Cerca, a cover of the 60s era Mexican band's hit. Who would've thought Sonic Youth style noise would mesh so beautifully with the song's romantic sensibility?

As for my cover song suggestion for the band I'm going with David Bowie's Queen Bitch. I leave you with a vid of Bowie and his blue guitar-- tweet the Girls you love it too -- plus GIAC in a very badass performance of Ven Cerca at a Hollywood Amoeba in-store, and, finally, the original Los Spitfire's version...

Wait Till Their Attention Turns to Brown People

If you think times are bad now with the radical right's ill-informed, irrational, and racially-tinged hatred of Obama wait till the current Health Care debate ends and Immigration Reform is considered.

Some dark days ahead indeed...

Jim Caroll - R.I.P.

Jim Caroll died. Here's a post I wrote on the very badass rocker last year:

Driving around L.A. listening to Indie 103.1, a local treasure if there ever was one, and stumbled across a fave song I haven't heard to in a long time, Jim Carroll's People Who Died, from his 1980 album Catholic Boy. Carroll was the writer/punk rocker who wrote the Basketball Diaries, an autobiography about growing up in New York in the 60s and 70s as a High School basketball star and heroin addict. It was later made into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. As you can guess, I recommend the book and not the film. From a Jim Carroll website:

Lynn Hirschberg, describing a Jim Carroll Band concert in 1980, before the release of Catholic Boy, reported overhearing a Oui photographer remark,"You're watching the Dylan of the 80s, you know. . . . Seeing Jim Carroll now . . . is like witnessing history.

Indeed, Jim Carroll expressed the Bomb-fear anticipation, the optimistic nihilism and glittering darkness of the 1980s that we who were there felt even if we couldn't communicate it ourselves. When JohnLennon was assassinated in front of the Dakota in December 1980, "People Who Died" was one of the most-requested songs on FM radio, just after Lennon's own "Imagine." Steven Spielberg chose "People Who Died" to play during the opening scene of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. "People Who Died" tapped a mainline. It was a hit even before it was released, and, as Newsweek's Barbara Graustark noted, it "propelled [Carroll] from underground status . . . to national attention as a contender for the title of rock's new poet laureate."

I don't know about the "Dylan of the 80s" line, but the rest is pretty accurate. To see the band play it live go here. Enjoy.

WTF?

Pat Buchanan blames the current Right Wing - Liberal cultural war on Cinco de Mayo and Cesar Chavez. Read homeboy's argument here. What an idiot.

Ken Burns Still Hates Mexicans

Been not blogging now for months; very busy with work on the TV show. Thankfully, the season's just about over, so expect some regular contributions in the days to come...

During the hiatus, I missed many opportunities for pontifications on significant things Latino and pop: badass events like Sonia Sotomayor becoming a Supreme Court justice, Mark Sanchez starting for the New York Jets, fellow Tejano Esteban Jordan ("The Jimi Hendrix of the Accordion") featured on NPR (listen here), LA David getting a Facebook page, a Chicano astronaut in space, and some not so badass events such as the broadcast of the entire season of the most racist show on cable TV, better known as Showtime's Weeds, no Latinos on Project Runway, and the Obama administration's decision to push comprehensive immigration reform to next year. But more on all that later. Promise.

I did, however, manage to knock out a couple of music videos for Girl in a Coma. Both were shot entirely within the happy confines of Loop 410, San Antonio -- of course -- and both are off the band's new CD, Trio B.C. I leave you with the vids, and keep coming back to the KenBurns for more posts on all things Latino and pop...

Same As It Ever Was

I know Obama's school speech is old news, especially in light of last night's address to Congress, and especially in the context of our 24/7 news cycle, but this was too good to pass up. From The New York Times...

Some kids don’t get to see the speech in Texas, because their parents kept them home, or their schools caved to a couple of loud guys in the parking lot. For them, the lesson is: play hooky whenever you feel like it, don’t respect authority, even your commander in chief, and if you say stupid things over and over you can get reasonable people to give in.

Whining works, especially in Texas, which ranked 46th in overall S.A.T. scores last year, falling further behind the national average.

“There are few moments in my life when I’m embarrassed to say I’m from Texas,” says Ron Kirk, the former Dallas mayor and current U.S. trade representative, who watched the speech with high school kids not far from your elementary school. “This is one of them.”

GingrichEstupido

As Think Progress reports, never mind the fact that Newt Gingrich hates Mexicans, has called Spanish a "ghetto language," and called Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a "racist," homeboy is now Twittering in Espanol.

Last year Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, and the man many consider one of the intellectuals of the Republican party, saw how the country's growing Brown demographics would quickly spell doom for the GOP, and so he set out to learn the language of Cervantes, Marquez and Chingo Bling. As Newt's PR flack put it...

The classes are being provided by an Atlanta-based institute, Bilingual America. (The institute's name seems a bit ironic, given that Mr. Gingrich reportedly said last weekend that "allowing bilingualism to continue to grow is very dangerous." But of course, I have to remember that he's offered a clarification for what he said last week.)

Mr. DeSantis says that Mr. Gingrich has studied 100 hours of a 280-hour Spanish course offered by the institute. In the first 120 hours, he is focusing mostly on vocabulary development and structure. After that, he'll focus on pronunciation, speech flow, and advanced structure. "When he finishes the course," Mr. DeSantis wrote in an e-mail, "Bilingual America projects him to communicate at a professonal level of Spanish or at the advanced-plus to superior level as rated by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages."

And for those of you wondering, here's the full quote where Newt somehow conflates living in the ghetto with his opposition to bilingual education.

"The American people believe English should be the official language of the government. ... We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto."

Still unclear if Newt''s going to translate the above "thoughts" for his next ghetto Tweet.

The Medium is the Message

So this band from Canada gets on a United plane to make their gig. As they wait for takeoff they look out the window, and, to their horror, witness bag handlers tossing around their guitar cases.

Of course the instruments are broken. The band wants money for the damages. And thus begins a one year struggle to get the airline to pay for the broken guitar. No one takes responsibility. Calls are put on hold or unreturned. The classic runaround.

Cut to now, and the frustrated band records a song narrating their plight and United's callous indifference. The group's YouTube video goes viral. CNN replays the story. David is beating Goliath. United calls, hat in hand, eager to work something out.

Great story. Crooks and Liars has it here. Not a bad song. But why did the band have to go the offensive stereotype route and portray themselves in large Mexican sombreros and big, black bigotes? WFT? It makes no sense in the context of the video's narrative. And, as one comment put it, "sure the song's nice, and congrats for it and the attention, but could this whitebread musician be any more tone-deaf if not racist? Sure, the sombreros and mustaches are cute - if you live in the 1950s or earlier and are NOT Mexican or Hispanic...it seems someone aggrieved of being treated poorly, like this musician, might think twice before dumping on another race to get cheap weak laughs."

Image of the Day

Photo by Thomas Michael Alleman. Check out his complete L.A. portfolio of images here.

Not Just Another Michael Jackson Piece...

Gilbert Garcia, over at the San Antonio Current, writes a great piece about MJ. Read it here. But what's especially wonderful is Garcia's opening anecdote, telling the story where in 1982 the King of Pop contributes backing vocals on a classic Tex Mex Nuevo Onda single...

There’s a little-known Michael Jackson recording that I’ve been flashing back to ever since MJ’s death last Thursday.

It’s a lilting reggae ballad by Austin Tex-Mex cult hero Joe “King” Carrasco called “Don’t Let A Woman (Make a Fool Out of You).” The story goes that Carrasco, then working on his 1982 album, Synapse Gap, spotted Jackson standing in the corridor outside the recording studio, and lured him in to do some backing vocals. Jackson’s harmonies are wonderfully ethereal on this track, with none of the self-importance that we would come to accept from him over the last two decades of his life.

What I love best about the recording, though, is the story behind it. The fact that Jackson, at the same time he was constructing his monumental Thriller album, willingly lent his golden falsetto to a song with little commercial potential, made by an obscure guy that he barely knew, is somehow reassuring. It suggests that while he was never a “regular guy,” Jackson did have a small window of young adulthood when he was approachable, when he wasn’t yet obsessed with his own myth.

Go here to listen to the song. Badass.

Robb Chavez -- El Mero Metal

For the past 12 years Robb's Metal Works was a San Antonio cable access show dedicated to all things musical, loud, and heavy. The show ran as a labor of love. Hosted and produced by Robb Chavez, the show was made for no money and little mainstream acclaim. Ni modo. The fans and the bands and labels loved the show. And whether or not you were a metalhead yourself, it was hard not to stand in awe of Robb's dedication to his show, metal fans across South Texas, and the often maligned genre. The show finally ends this week. Robb's going back to school to get his PhD.

In an article I wrote for the San Antonio Current back in 1999 on San Antonio metal, (you can read the piece here), Robb figured in the part where I talk about the local scene. (Oh, and for those lame Coldplay fans out there wondering what exactly a "Pissing Razors" is, they were a metal band out of El Paso, Texas.)

It's a typical Thursday night at the White Rabbit and standing on a chair this Pissing Razors night is Baylor University graduate Robb Chavez. No musical genre draws such intense fan loyalty as Heavy Metal, and in San Antonio, there is no greater metal fan than Robb Chavez.

For the past two and a half years, Chavez has produced the cable access show Robb's Metal Works (Saturdays, 11:30 am, on Channel 20). Consisting of band interviews, live concert footage, and traditional music videos, Robb's Metal Works is a cross between a local version of MTV's Headbanger's Ball and a very well-connected fanzine.

Serving as Metal Work's host, interviewer, videographer, producer and editor, Chavez will celebrate his 100th episode on May 22nd – no small feat for a guy with no budget and no prior production experience, all the more impressive, when you realize he's never shown a rerun. A contemporary cable version of another passionate hard rock fan, Joe Anthony, Chavez serves a dual function as disseminator of what's up in the international metal scene, as well as a promoter of local band talent.

"I got the idea for the show," Chavez says, "because there was nothing else out there."  Robb's Metal Works is just one part of an underground network of ‘zines, slick mags, word of mouth, and the internet.

These days, in true bad-boy fashion, metal kids surreptitiously log on in the school library computers and download valuable pages of treasured and arcane information from any number of web sites hosted by metal bands, distributors, and metalheads from all over the world. These days, there’s easily accessible news, such as Pissing Razors CD release date, downloadable sound files of upcoming releases, blow-by-blow tour diaries, passionate debate on whether Marilyn Manson is Metal or not; and ad infinitum links to other metal sites around the world. 

Jim Beal at the San Antonio Express-News writes a great piece about Robb here. Robb's official website is here. And I leave you with a clip of an interview Robb conducted with guitarist Nick Hipa of  San Diego metalcore band As I Lay Dying.

Viva Sotomayor!

Artwork by Favianna Rodriguez. Visit the website and download here.

Image of the Day

Been way busy these past few months with various projects. Among them, two new music videos for Girl in a Coma. They'll be ready in a week or so. Till then, here are some pics I took of the band during their in-store appearance at Best Buy in San Antonio. Great crowd. Raza for days....

The girls are touring as we speak. Go here to check if they'll be in a city near you. Their new album, Trio B.C., is available now on Blackheart Records. And for sure marvel at the very badass cover art by Shizu Saldamando.

Still Invisible

From a New York Times Book review by Toure, writing about the latest Colson Whitehead novel, Sag Harbor, and the concept of "post-blackness."

Substitute "black" with "brown," or, to get even more specific, with "Chicano," and a better description of post-ethnic life can't be found since the writings of my man Greg Tate

Unfortunately, for us post-Chicanos, we find ourselves not reveling in a wonderfully complex and nuanced world making our art, but instead waste our time telling gringos that "no, the last immigrant in my family was, like, in 1926," and "no, I couldn't tell you which part of Mexico but I can tell you that the bean and cheese at Taco Cabana is delicious."

Now that we’ve got a post-black president, all the rest of the post-blacks can be unapologetic as we reshape the iconography of blackness. For so long, the definition of blackness was dominated by the ’60s street-fighting militancy of the Jesses and the irreverent one-foot-out-the-ghetto angry brilliance of the Pryors and the nihilistic, unrepentantly ghetto, new-age thuggishness of the 50 Cents. A decade ago they called post-blacks Oreos because we didn’t think blackness equaled ghetto, didn’t mind having white influencers, didn’t seem full of anger about the past. We were comfortable employing blackness as a grace note rather than as our primary sound. Post-blackness sees blackness not as a dogmatic code worshiping at the altar of the hood and the struggle but as an open-source document, a trope with infinite uses.

The term began in the art world with a class of black artists who were adamant about not being labeled black artists even as their work redefined notions of blackness. Now the meme is slowly expanding into the wider consciousness. For so long we were stamped inauthentic and bullied into an inferiority complex by the harder brothers and sisters, but now it’s our turn to take center stage. Now Kanye, Questlove, Santigold, Zadie Smith and Colson Whitehead can do blackness their way without fear of being branded pseudo or incognegro.