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.

Image of the Day

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

 

 

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.

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."

Same At It Ever Was #49

Some people just don't get it. Or if they do, they just don't care. Seems another group of ignorant white students -- in this case, law students at Tulane University -- not only planned a party around the theme of "The Border" -- showing up for the fiesta in large, floppy sombreros and pasted-on black mustaches -- but stupidly photographed their gringo selves in the offending costumes.

And then they posted the images on Facebook. Pendejos.

Remind me not to retain any lawyers graduating from Tulane. They sound like idiots. Guanabee, broke the story and has the details here, plus they thoughtfully posted more of the festive party pics at which to gawk at with disbelieving, open mouth. Someone please forward the pics to the Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh types who are now arguing that Obama's election (which they all opposed, by the way) proves America is no longer racist and for all the brown people to now please shut up and stop complaining.

For some odd reason a few of the gringos sported aviator sunglasses as a signifier of "Mexicaness." The sombreros I get, but aviator sunglasses? I'm guessing that's because Benicio del Toro wore them in Traffic? Or is that giving their semiotic skills too much credit? In any case the beer of choice appeared to be Corona. Typical. One of the students, a Peter Skarsgard looking chubby guy, deviated from the sombrero look and was dressed like a cholo. I immeditatley knew homeboy was inauthentic because he was not leaning like one. Plus vato's whiteboy's fake Pendelton shirt was buton-down. Dork. Be sure and read the comments over at the Guanabee post. Some people actually defend the use of racist stereotypes as appropriate Law School party wear. Our future best and brightest indeed.

Song of the Day

I'm hearing this song a lot these days a lot on the always badass Indie 103, 'Electric Feel' by MGMT, one of those tunes that keeps playing over and over in your head even when the radio's turned off. Not that the world needs another white boy hipster band outta Brooklyn but check out the video anyway, here, and I dare you not to bop your head in delight.

I'd post the song myself but embedding for the video has been disabled. Bastards. What I am able show, however, is a clip documenting the making of the music video. Watching the clip I learned that the song is about a woman from the Amazon "who has the power to shock people with electricity that runs through her veins." Hm. Maybe certain pop songs, like the making of sausage, should be a process best performed in secret. Oh well, at least it's a catchy tune and great to dance to.

MGMT is one of those bands who have managed to find career success in this post-radio, everything-downloadable, CD unfriendly music busines environment. An environment where songs reach the masses not via Casey Kasem and Top 40 (Kasem, for those of you under 30 40, homeboy was an old school DJ with a national radio show not to mention the voice of Shaggy on Scoobey Doo), but instead songs gain mass popularity through stretegic placement on teen friendly TV shows like Gossip Girl. According to Wikipedia, MGMT has had their songs played on, among many other shows and films, the premier episode of the new Beverly Hills 90210, Skins, the video games Midnight Club Los Angeles, FIFA'09, and Shaun White Snowboarding...not to mention, of course, the season finale of Gossip Girl.

What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and Cable TV Talk Shows

"Rock critics," David Lee Roth once famously quipped, "admire Elvis Costello because rock critics look like Elvis Costello." Diamond Dave said this back in the day when the Van Halen singer actually had hair, fronted the most famous rock band in the world, and yet suffered the ignominy of having much of the positive critical reviews from both sides of the Atlantic going to the geeky, Buddy Holly-looking Costello. While there may have been a whiff of truth to Roth's observation, there's no denying Costello's genius and place in rock and roll history.

Straight outta the late 70s London punk scene, Costello snarled his witty, literate, and dense lyrics over pop music energized by the scene he emerged from. On a personal note, as a geeky critic type myself, Costello was always a favorite of mine.

Tonight the Sundance channel debuts Spectacle, Costello's new talk show. From the early reviews look forward to a engaging hour of television. Here's how Salon describes the show:

This is what heaven must look like for songwriters. You wander into the middle of a lively conversation between close friends Elton John and Elvis Costello, discussing the virtues of songwriting greats from Leon Russell to Laura Nyro. Next, Costello plays an odd acoustic version of "Femme Fatale" by the Velvet Underground, and Lou Reed wanders in to demonstrate the correct riff from "Sweet Jane," then confesses that his secret dream is to write a New York detective novel. Later, Tony Bennett, Rufus Wainwright and the Police stop by.

Heaven indeed. Tivo this sucker. Until then, enjoy the rare clip above from Costello's infamous December 1977 Saturday Night Live appearance. Costello was a last-minute replacement for the Sex Pistols who had cancelled due to visa problems (not to mention manager Malcom McLaren's propensity for media hype). Under no circumstances, Costello was ordered, was the singer to play his hit single 'Radio, Radio,' a biting critique of corporate-owned, soul-sucking radio (that you could dance to). Of course, live, that Saturday Night, a few notes into the agreed-upon rehearsed song of 'Less Than Zero,' Costello stopped the music and promply went into the controversial song. SNL producer Lorne Michael's went nuts and banned Elivs from appearing on the show for the next twelve years. Cheeky.