Ken Burns Hates Mexicans

Game 1

Protección

The Spurs are down 2-0 in their second round NBA Playoff series against the New Orleans Hornets. Game 3 is tonight. What that means, gente, is run, don't walk, down to your neighborhood botanica to buy -- and light -- a good luck candle. Until then, this virtual vela will have to do. Go Spurs Go.

Thanks Dupa Sandwich for the photo.

Team Chicano

Tim Duncan hits his first three pointer of the season. At the buzzer. Just in time to send the Spurs into a second overtime and an eventual defeat of the Phoenix Suns in Game 1 of the first round of the NBA Playoffs. A game  many experts are considering as one of the most exciting playoff games in recent history. The Spurs are boring? Self-serving propaganda perpetuated by Lakers-obsessed pundits. Now I know what it's like to be a Hillary supporter.

In any case, this is as good a time as any to repost my Top Ten Reasons Why Latinos Should Root for the Spurs to Repeat in 2008:

Point guard Tony Parker regularly attends the Alma awards.

Point guard Tony Parker is also known as Mr. Eva Longoria.

Taco Cabana banners hang on the same rafters as the 1999, 2003, 2005, and 2007 Championship banners.

Forward Bruce Bowen is married to a Cubana and speaks fluent Spanish.

Once, on a live post game TV interview, Bowen called Celtics guard Ray Allen guey and the censors had no idea what he was talking about.

Guard Manu Ginobli and center Fabrico Oberto are from Argentina.

You will never see so many Raza faces at a major sporting event in the United States this side of a Chivas USA soccer game.

Tim Duncan, arguably the best player in basketball the past decade, is neither power forward nor center.  Ni de aqui ni de alla.  In between.  The embodiment of the Chicano experience. 

The Spurs fans sing Volver during the time outs.

And, most importantly, the NBA title now rests safely back in Aztlan. Let's keep it there.

¡Ajua!

The Politics of Dancing

So I'm in the middle of making some TV reality/doc shows, twelve total, an all-consuming activity which not only results in a admittedly lazy dependence on YouTube blog posts for loyal KenBurnsHatesMexicans readers -- apologies -- but also a serious back up of programs on my TiVo. But one show I never miss is Dancing With the Stars. Not only because the ABC series features the dancing talents of Cheryl Burke (be still my heart), but I'm a sucker for the Pas0 Doble. Imagine the irony, then, of getting offered two free tickets to this Monday's taping of Dancing With the Stars -- and having to turn them down. Like I said, I'm in the middle of production. We'll be flying to San Antonio that day. Oh well...

The upside, of course, is I'm going back home: breakfast tacos 2 for 99 cents; "G-o  S-p-u-r-s  G-o" spelled out with white styrofoam cups stuck into people's chain link fences (talk about the art of Phantom Sightings); Esteban Jordan live at Salute on Friday nights (the "Jimi Hendrix of the Accordion" -- video proof here); Henry's puffy tacos (over eight million sold); Bill Miller iced tea; the big wide aisles of HEB; plus I can finally figure out why my fellow Tejanos went for Hillary. I mean, what's up with that?

Will be shooting four episodes of the TV show during San Antonio's Fiesta Week. For those non-Texans out there blissfully unaware of the cultural and political dynamics of Fiesta Week -- beyond its apt description of as Mardi Gras, but with Mexicans -- I leave you with this clip from my movie Speeder Kills. And for those of you sadly unaware of the delights of the Paso Doble, I leave you with this clip from last season of Dancing With the Stars, where Mario Lopez introduces America to his Chicano family before dazzling us with his version of the Latin ballroom dance. Have a good weekend.

Postcard From Grungelandia

Was away for the past three days in Seattle giving a presentation at the Experience Music Project's Pop Conference, an annual gathering of music critics talking about all things cultural, musical, and pop. Amazing time, in an admitted geeky fan boy kind of way. Best part of the weekend was meeting two of my heroes, Griel Marcus, who's idea of Lipstick Traces led me to apply his theory of Secret Histories oh-so-appropriately to U.S. Latinos, and my main man Greg Tate, who's seminal book of essays on Black culture and music, Flyboy in the Buttermilk, taught me how to be a better post-Chicano. I've been carrying around my tattered paperback of Tate's book for almost fourteen years now freely appropriating vato's still radical ideas on race and culture.

Allow me to quote from a piece I wrote on Latino filmmaking for the San Francisco Bay Guardian many years ago (full article here). The essay not only distills Tate's particular ideas on fusing specific ethnic sensibilities with "white" influences to create something new, but also gives a snapshot of the sad state of Latino filmmaking eight or nine years ago. But even more lamentable? The situation of Raza cinema hasn't improved much since then. Oh well, at least we had Elisa Jimenez from Project Runway last year and, of course, Alex Rivera's upcoming post-border sci-fi epic, Sleep Dealer. Punto!

It is with some irony, then, that I turn to the ideas of the one African American writer who most captures the emerging hybrid sensibility/strategy of a new post-movimiento generation of Latino filmmakers, and future of brown film.

There is a patented, vertiginous moment in a Greg Tate essay ("Cult Nats Meet Freaky-Deke") where the self-described Flyboy in the Buttermilk expounds in his usual dizzying and apt rhetoric on a liberating aesthetic current among certain enlightened Black artists. He talks about those anti-essentialist folks who "feel secure enough about Black culture to claim art produced by nonblacks as part of their inheritance." (Substitute “black” for “brown” in the above quote and it sounds like many contemporary U.S. Latinos.) A 150 plus word litany then ensues where the provocative writer headbumps pairings of seminal influential artist types as evidence of his theory of how seemingly disparate cultural influences actually make cogent sense when incorporated by certain enlightened black artists.

Just a sampling from Señor Tate’s intentionally contradictory two-page list: "...George Clinton and George Romero, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Lisette Model, Zora Neale Hurston and Akira Kurosawa...Jah Rastafari and Johnny Rotten...Anthony Braxton and Bruce Lee...Antonin Artaud and Amira Baraka...Fredric Jameson and Reverend James Cleveland," and on and on and on.

Absent, of course, in Tate's glib Who's Who are any American artists of the Brown variety. Now I mention this not so much to dis brother Tate (OK, maybe just a little -- those who preach post-modern pastiche, after all, should practice it) but more so because the guy's on to something.

“...Malcolm X and Jimi Hendrix...?”

That’s cool. But how about certain Chicano/Latino artists that also easily navigate and reference and knowingly subvert all that pop America -- North and South -- has to offer.  Take Luis M. Meza's sublime 1996 ultra low budget feature, Staccato Purr of the Exhaust. In that very cool ultra low budget feature Meza mixes the influences of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jim Jarmusch, and lo-fi rock and roll into a new American idie film sensibility.

The point being, of course, not to lay down some unproductive one-up-manship in referencology with African American artists -- 'cause Prince Paul or the RZA would totally kick our Latino ass in that kind of sampling mano-a-mano -- no, what matters here is illustrating just another example of the culturally specific, all-encompassing power of mestizaje -- our people's predeliction for hybridity and mixing -- our necessary mastery of two cultures -- the creation of a natural brown aesthetic informing our movies. It's a distinct creative strategy that's worked in the past, and being transformed for the future.

Will be posting more details and observations the next few days on all the things Latino and pop and relevant I encountered at the conference. Not to mention pontifications on Alberto "The Geneva Convention is Quaint" Gonzales' job search (no one wants to hire him); the Spurs loss to the hated Lakers (we'll get 'em in the playoffs); and a response to a way fucked up review by a clueless gringo critic writing on the Phantom Sightings show. Stay tuned...

And Now For Something Completely Different...

Admittedly, unless you're either 1) a Spurs fan, 2) live anywhere  in the vicinity of a neighborhood H-E-B, or 3) love humor that makes fun of Beatnics and/or slam poetry (and who doesn't), this will make no sense to you. If that's the case I then recommend appreciating it for it's utter weirdness. More absurdity here.

The Global Game

I promised to cut down on the Spurs posts, a hard vow to keep given the scare the other night when Tim Duncan went down with what looked like a very bad injury to his knee (Homeboy's fine, will be out for only a few days.) But I didn't say anything about refraining from showing Tibetan monks playing basketball. Check out the monk's drive up the middle a la Tony Parker before he flicks it out to the dude over at the wing who hits with a nice jumper.

Go Espurs Go

The new NBA season starts today and I promise to keep the San Antonio Spurs posts to a minimum. But I do take this opportunity to reprise a post I wrote at the start of last season's playoffs. You know, the one where the Spurs went on to win the NBA Championship. So here it is -- Top Ten Reasons Why Latinos Should Root for the Spurs to Repeat in 2008:

Point guard Tony Parker regularly attends the Alma awards.

Point guard Tony Parker is also known as Mr. Eva Longoria.

Taco Cabana banners hang on the same rafters as the 1999, 2003, 2005, and 2007 Championship banners.

Forward Bruce Bowen is married to a Cubana and speaks fluent Spanish.

Once, on a live post game TV interview, Bowen called Celtics guard Ray Allen guey and the censors had no idea what he was talking about.

Guard Manu Ginobli and center Fabrico Oberto are from Argentina.

You will never see so many Raza faces at a major sporting event in the United States this side of a Chivas USA soccer game.

Tim Duncan, arguably the best player in basketball the past decade, is neither power forward nor center.  Ni de aqui ni de alla.  In between.  The embodiment of the Chicano experience. 

The Spurs fans sing Volver during the time outs.

And, most importantly, the NBA title now rests safely back in Aztlan.

¡Ajua!

ELP

Before it's too late -- and history conveniently swept under the rug -- it should be mentioned that Desperate Housewives premiered this week and on it Eva Longoria, the Most Famous Chicana On ABC, introduced her new name in the show's opening credits: She is no longer Eva Longoria, a Tejana from Corpus, but now Eva Longoria Parker, a Tejana from Corpus now married to Tony Parker, Spurs point guard, and legal immigrant from France.

(For those of you out there quick to point out that America Ferrrara is really the Most Famous Chicana On ABC, given the Ugly Betty star's recent Emmy win, please note I said Chicana, not Latina. America, after all, is from Honduras. And for those of you gringos out there properly dazed and confused -- Latina, Chicana, Hispanic -- it's a nuanced, cultural thing, a never ending debate with which we tediously fill up time and column inches arguing. Be glad you'll never understand.)

In any case, not sure if Eva's name change is a reflection of blissful matrimonial inclusion or else the TV star's secret love for 70s Prog Rock. Turns out the happy loving bride's new initials -- ELP -- soon to be embroidered on the couple's luxory bath towels, also stand for Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, the British rock group, famous for 20 minute songs, extensive use of moog synthesizers, and creepy H. R. Giger album covers. Coincidence? The jury's still out.

I leave you with this live performance of the band's most famous song, Karn Evil 9 - 1st Impression, Part 2, from the infamous 1974 California Jam outdoor concert (where headliners Deep Purple burned and destroyed the stage). Even for those non-fans of classic prog rock (shame on you), the first minute of the clip is worth a view for nothing else than the hilarious man-on-the-street interviews with the mellow hippies.
 

NBA Championship Back in Aztlan

The Spurs sweep the Cavs to take their fourth NBA championship in nine years. Jubilant raza fans take to the streets of San Anto. ¡Ajua!

Photo by Tom Reel, San Antonio Express-News.