Familiar Dystopia, circa 2002.

I got my grubby hands back on this bit of prose I wrote in 2001-2002 in this women's workshop held at Highways Performance Space led by the matchless Sharon Bridgforth. I feel like sharing. This was one of my first meditations on space when I lived at 2715 Bellevue Avenue and commuted to Northridge for school and Santa Monica for work often taking the bus and probably feeling self-righteous for it. Back then I had a lot of community organizers in my life so the feeling was often co-opted back and forth. That's how we do.

Anyway, space will always be present in any work that I do. Check it.

Familiar Dystopia

Sometimes los angeles is a large belly turning and everyone trapped inside is trying to hop on to sidewalks and duck under trees, avoiding falling gases and acids. Survival is trend, but it hurts to get caught on the verge of digestion. On this bus, in my car, in your car, in this building, at this bar, the days and lives of this city intersect without ever touching, speaking, looking into each other's eyes. And despite the sprawl, there are too many places in this city where my shoulders and knees brush up against someone else's against their will. And my exhale means it's your turn to breathe now. There are too many instances that I feel compelled to honk at the Jaguars ahead of me, but I fear coming face to face with my own powerlessness. And still on buses, I manage to pass judgment to the cars I look down on whose windows are shut as a familiar cloud of pot smoke lingers around passenger face and hands. Other times I measure my level of safety walking down Sunset in Echo Park according to how many brown and black faces outnumber the white ones. L.A. has it all. I would write a poem about it, but the movie trucks across the street from MacArthur Park obscure my view of the evening skyline. Mine are one pair of witness eyes. Immigrant trannies, las mas chuliadas de esta ciudad, claim bar stools and dance floors and accept watered down cocktails from their neighbors’ husbands. And you only have 10 seconds to cross the street because here the SUV is king and pedestrian is just another Armenian last name.

I am bound to this city, but don't call it loyalty. A nation all its own, but I am no nationalist. I don't do Dodger Blue today. Or wave a Laker flag. My flag is the white of surrender to the soul-numbing freeways. But at least on the 101 South coming home from the Valley I can practice my singing to Freddie Mercury or Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam. My body never knew such pleasure, my heart never knew such pain and you, you leave me so confused. L.A., are you the bedridden parent I'm forced by tradition to care for? L.A. foremothers and kingpins, kingmakers and drag queens keep their children, like enemies, close by and clip their wings in the name of guidance. Crumbs. I'm just looking for a few crumbs. Still, that's cool, because I'm a socialist revolutionary starfucker and the breadline is just another addition to my commie fetish list.

But I get happy. I still get happy. My days are made when I hear the persistence of Spanish in the formerly Latino quarters of Café Tropical, 7 Mares and the Silver Lake lounge. When young rockeros stop to talk about the dead Salvadoran revolutionary poet on my t-shirt, I say - "Take that, gentrification!" I live to eavesdrop on the dirty jokes and late night workshift horror stories that only the finest Michoacan native son can tell. In my 'hood, bald-headed daddies and tight miniskirted mamis hold their children proudly like schoolbooks against their chest, while I'm left to learn real life in classrooms, and I get labeled the future? And then I am humbled and lower my head. Alvarado and Beverly, 7th and Hoover, Santa Monica and Western. My eyes silently whispering thank you. These are the women who've known me in unconquered languages, transmitting strength, endurance and desire through their breast milk. Damn, you are SO tough. Crossing NAFTA-stamped terrain, stepping through barbed wire and beneath gatekeeper's radar, with baby on your back. Your love must be dark and deep, rich and haunting, pure and bitter-tasting like the scent of dried jamaica flowers. You are so tough. And then there are the ones who are so tough, they call it God's will when they leave their babies behind.

Like my mother, whose journey north was a fortunate trek from San Salvador, on plane she was blessed as she drew the right holy card, the most coveted document she had that visa and doors opened. She was a fortunate one indeed. To leave behind weak economy, battered household, homicidal husband and big-eyed boy, precious firstborn son. Big brother. Long eyelashes and smooth copper skin. Trauma. No child should have firsthand knowledge of such absence. Working and providing from very far away. Landing on Coronado Avenue. 10 people one room. Abuelita y tias seran mis mamas. Six years. A long time to take care of someone else's blond children at $20 a week. Stress. Jaime, mi hijo. What must you think of me now?

Crossing Identity Streams with the Thorns of Life

The first couple of days of the year of the Ox have produced strange yet pleasant nostalgia about the days before the Internet, the daze before identity markers. It was a time before I knew how to wave any identity-driven flags. If I was any younger then I might freak out at the nerdiness I embodied 16 years ago. Luckily I’m able to just let all that shit go and enjoy the fact that I was a smart angst-ridden teenager that managed to have a good time on my terms while maintaining a chuntara sartorial sensibility that teetered between pleasing my immigrant parents and gliding under the gender appropriate radar.

I am 32 years old and I spent my adolescence avoiding sex and drugs to chase bands around the sprawl of Los Angeles at soon-to-be documented sites like Jabberjaw, the Anti-Club, the Alligator Lounge, Spaceland, Macondo on Melrose which was right around the corner to the Bike Kitchen in the Heliotrope haven for the post-messenger bicyclist, Saint Lucy’s which was adjacent to Fais Do Do, UCLA’s Coop, Claremont Colleges, and Cell 63, which rotated out of several public storage garages in Sun Valley, Pacoima and Northridge. I was too young for Raji’s in Hollywood and Fender’s in Long Beach but I was able to catch a lot of great and epoch-defining shows, at least for myself.

I hate sounding like a some kind of technological Archie Bunker but it was a time in which people actually used to postal system and fanzines to communicate their feelings about bands, shows, tours and the concomitant gossip to one another across zip codes, area codes, counties and states. I swear I am no Luddite but there was something kind of magical about actually using your hands on a typewriter, a steering wheel driving to Kinko’s, ripping off Kinko’s and selling the ‘zine to folks you talked to directly that I kind of miss.

But another thing I miss is the ability to compartmentalize my identity according to the band I listen to which brings me to my current site of torment: The Thorns of Life.

Thorns of Life is the new Blake Schwarzenbach musical project. Blake Schwarzenbach is my fucking Bob Dylan. More than anything I write this blog because I cannot turn the hands of time back to last Thursday. It was the day in which instead of turning in grad school applications I should have opened the goddamn LA Weekly to see that Thorns of Life were playing in some god-forsaken spot in Eagle Rock.




I am an asshole. I missed the show. Can somebody hold me?


Yet, who cares, right? Well, you obviously don’t know that I have been enamored with Schwarzenbach’s first significant band, Jawbreaker, for almost 20 years now. That is fine, I can’t expect you to know such meaningless crap about me. But Jawbreaker’s oeuvre pretty much helped me understand, and dare I say, contextualize gendered dynamics, uncomfortable truths and sexually tense circumstances, too (see the song Chesterfield King off their 24-Hour Revenge Therapy for reference). I was so butt hurt and unable to process grief that when Jawbreaker broke up and Blake moved to New York, I just could not deal let alone enjoy his next project, the magnificent Jets to Brazil.

Blake’s new band features Aaron Cometbus of Crimpshrine and the Cometbus mini-bibles all handwritten in the most perfect penmanship from the empty train cars of the Southern Pacific. The band also features Daniela Sea on bass. Yes, Daniela Sea of the (*shudder*) L Word. I feel weird about that collaboration—he on guitar, he on drums and she on bass. Sure, she played in Bay Area punk rock mainstays The Gr’Ups and Cipher in the Snow but so what? I was all about Blatz, Tribe 8 and The Tourettes and Raooul anyway, you know the stuff that actually made it down to Los Angeles. I was into The Haggard, never Bitch and Animal.

Hey man, Daniela is fine on the L Word and to each their own but I am tired of accepting the mediocrity in the name of visibility, especially considering the perfunctory writing on that show. I will also never forgive those pig-bitches for the “Papi” character perpetuating bullshit Latina stereotypes. So why does Sea have to ruin it and be in a band with my man? Now all these lesbians will be at Thorns of Life show—and all we have in common is that we have sexual relations with other female-bodied females.

Man, and to think that I was so desperately trying to avoid the L Word at all costs this year and like the freakin’ mafia, Schwarzenbach pulls me back into this bottom-feeding scene by joining forces with the likes of them. This is worse than gender policing in public restrooms. What is this discomfort that I feel? Like it’s not bad enough to be rendered invisible by white dudes, I got to go and be terribly transparent to white lesbians that could rob me of my rightful place at Thorns of Life shows, too? My psychic wounds collected through punk rock are survivor scars I show to you now but I am more lenient on punk and indie rock scenes because they are places for misanthropes and fuck-ups. The lesbian scene portends to open its doors to all women-loving-women, which is bullshit. My trauma from those circuits of sociability is still alive and thriving every day.

So don’t get me wrong—I love the mixed gender and orientation bands. I love Hazel and Bloc Party and Husker Du and Unwound because you know with those bands it has always just been about the music not any sort of toxic psychic spillage. But of course, there’s this heinous zeitgeist that the L Word has become these last few years amongst the champions of the Kunte Kinte. I ask you: have you ever been to an L Word viewing party at a lesbian bar? Never had I felt like such a sloppy Mexican until I went to the Falcon in West Hollywood. To be inundated by power suits, crazy geometric hair and butch dykes in skinny jeans and leather jackets was too much for me to ever want to return.

Indie rock and punk shows offer a respite, a place of refuge if you will, from lesbian-specific spatial and social dysfunction. I have gone to rock shows and know that I can be ignored on my own terms. But lesbians! Who really understands them? When we’re not ignoring each other then we’re neglecting the playlist and end up resentfully dancing to vapid Katy Perry-like music. I am compelled to ________ the pain away and right now it looks like an Adam Sandler dramatic vehicle (I’m looking at you, Punch Drunk Love) might do the trick.

All I want is for my lesbian life to separate from my punk life, no matter how far apart they actually are—it somehow convinces me that I am in control of an otherwise powerless existence.

Thorns of Life is a Venn diagram I am unwilling to participate in at the present moment, but know I will have to at some point if I want my special feelings to be acknowledged and taken care of in the form of some cryptic, revenge-laden power pop scorcher. I guess I will be fine as long as there aren’t any Thorns of Life parties being held in West Hollywood or see any snarky posts about stocky lesbians in Dickies attire on Craigslist.

Ugh.

Art Versus Brand | Stealing for Inspiration

Last week, my partner’s sister and brother-in-law drove down from their home in Steinbeck Country, Salinas, for the wild industry freakshow in Orange County that is the yearly global music products convention known as NAMM. Two years ago I got to walk the innards of the Anaheim Convention Center and lasciviously linger over the Rickenbacker and Paul Reed Smith guitars, the same brands used by my personal rock gods, Paul Weller and Carlos Santana. Few things question my atheism and music and the ocean are two things that reinforce any inkling of spirituality that lies dormant inside my shell. So in these rare moments I must seize the emotional connection I have to large bodies of water and to the guitar-bass-drum trifecta. I used to check out Ozomatli, Invisbl Skratch Picklz and Mix Master Mike so I go straight into auto-pilot mode and bob my head in response to the knob-noodling and crab-gripping (you know, like the kind that put DJ Shadow on the map) on the mixer by the toughest selectors sampling all the newest DJ gear. In grad school they tell you to never ever say this in relation to the burden of your identity, but in this situation, it felt natural. This was just a privileged peek inside the musically banal, the pragmatics of music making, the minutiae of roadie logistics, things like guitar pedals (no Big Muff to Tuff), drum equipment, airport suitcases for guitar amps, digital versus analog, Luddites versus mouse-clickers.

If you have never been a part of music making or spending social time with friends in absolute silence except for the sound of Miles Davis’ fusion period cranked to 11 or even playing Dark Side of the Moon to a Wizard of Oz on mute then you might not find the aforementioned understandable but worthy of your derisive attention. There is a lot of crunchy curly hair, bellydancers, groupies-in-training, emulators and fanboys so engrossed in meeting everyone from Sheila E (which Zoe and Efrain did! LUCKY!) to Dave Mustaine that you forget that sometimes passions are messy and hard to look at with a serious face. I had no idea if we would run into any famous folk ourselves but I made to sure to dress the part of musical aficionado. On me though that look translates as Samantha Ronson in a funhouse mirror with my old-school fedora, white-shirt, hoodie vest and leather cuff even though I’m aiming for Damone in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Sabrina, my partner, totally agrees to be my Lindsey Lohan. The people of NAMM look the way they do with no hint of irony and have no hopes or desire to ever appear on the webpages of hipster photography or mean-spirited sight-charting blogs. They just look like they work at a music shop in Downey.

The male-female ratio at NAMM is off by 1000% so all this male attention inundates my partner and her sister, as if they’re the Kelly LeBrock character from that movie, Weird Science, going down the escalator in the mall scene. I even see musicians I thought were dead but are actually alive like Bootsy Collins. I thought that dude was totally dead. I was wrong.

This year, I didn’t have a pass to official NAMM but managed to go and check out Armando Peraza and Giovanni Hidalgo to bring gender balance to the sausage party in one of the big Hilton ballrooms. Both men performed with other beloved studio musicians that, like Pereza and Hidalgo, contributed to popular understanding of Latin music classic recordings. But there’s a distinction to the musical appreciation and I just want to make that clear. Peraza and Hidalgo both appeared on recording by guys like Hector Lavoe, Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamaria, Santana and Charlie Parker. The lazy listener might have different occasions for which to hear recordings by these artists, nary one to actually approach any record to look at and study the credits and possible liner notes. They understood and obtained their appreciation of the musicians onstage through their personal attachments to the records these guys appeared on and there are many. Just call this a clichéd observation of fandom and commitment to craft but I just want to give it up to those that take the time between breakfast, lunch and dinner, punching in and punching out, happy hour and hangover to do their homework.

This episode dares me to think that Peraza and Hidalgo might be the last of the artists in a world where each day it’s not so much the concept, the virtuousity, the spirit anymore but the brand that gains circulation and popularity. I’m not suggesting artistic extinction it’s something else. Every year I’m finding myself admiring the hobby artist—those that do their craft out of love and not careerist necessity—and the multiple ways in which they admire other artists. Peraza and Hidalgo are by no means living in obscurity but maybe it’s because there will always be hobby artists that appreciate and understand the artistic labor of hired hands, musical braceros if you will but with better pay and different relation to posterity. I just think maybe someone like Santana is understood popularly more as a brand, you know like you hear Black Magic Woman at your Chicano nationalist uncle’s wedding party or the aisles of a Pep Boys and it feels like Coca-Cola for your ears, especially more so now when he adds vanilla and lime and diet to his repertoire by adding goofy pop singers crooning mindlessly on his later work. Maybe Santana is an artist in a world where the masses are unaware about how much they lose when they give their souls, credit card numbers and social security codes over to the corporate structure in the name of immediacy and convenience. It is the loss of patience, passion, and attention spans—the holy trinity in critical consumption—but the truth might be that some people would rather just download it and go, not pore over the grooves playing name-that-guitar-pedal.



And then before I fall into this tragic abyss fueled by self-righteous diatribes about the scarcity of artistic integrity and consumer-producer interface I look at this Jim Jarmusch quote that’s been circulating mightily up and down the blogosphere this last week about stealing with gusto in the pursuit of personal authenticity. Fortunately the quote operates like an inhaler calming my most reactionary impulses to rail against the artist becoming commodity. It pacifies my inner Jack Black-in-High Fidelity beast against getting mad for not just selling out but for stealing voraciously to sell out, getting mad because they don’t work the mind and soul-suck of the 9 to 5 while we slave after dinner to get that line break down or that chorus-verse-chorus into shape.

Does that mean that inspiration is always thievery? I guess it’s time to think about critical thievery and if it is going start playing a role in my own art-making practices (and maybe your own) and speculate if these practices coincide more with dominant mainstream artistic industry standards or intervene and disidentify against such standards. I guess because DIY-styles proliferate differently now because of the Internets it’s almost become really easy to become a brand. I mean part of me can’t hate on Shepard Fairey because the fool did follow and wheatpasted the trail blazed by Robbie Conal, even if it was with some stylized rendering of this totally geeky esoteric part of my WWF-watching past. Fairey does what has and will continue to make the masses clamor for more—makes the dorky cool. Transforming geeky knowledge, however trivial it is, into something visually stunning will always put money in your wallet. And for some, possibly the majority considering how hard it is to sway them, politics is really dorky, definitely uninteresting to look at because there’s not enough good art with the resources to be advertised as brands. I don’t want to spend time on qualifying dorky or turning it into some kind of keyword or whatever so let’s just keep going with it for now. Politics is dorky, political graphics is for a politicized niche of people that like to collect that kind of cultural document. I brought back a bunch of gorgeous OSPAAL posters from my first and only trip to Cuba ten years ago because I like to have cool graphics that match the interior of my political leanings. But if you look at those pictures of me from that trip then you will see that I indeed presented visually as a dork.

This is difficult damned-if-you-do terrain to hover over because I know there are two camps of artists out there—those that believe in citationality, that is, getting permission—and those that don’t. There is the “Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal” bunch that feel emboldened to project those whims and calculations publicly. I guess Mark Vallen’s critique of the Obey man himself has me all in a tizzy, especially as I anticipate Favianna Rodriguez’ continued criticism of artist stealing from political visual archives to push their own careers further (like into the Smithsonian) and being self-aware about it while doing it. But then I think about hip-hop’s origins in the borrowing and stealing arena and its ability to take the old and repackage it into something truly transformative. Yet, I understand the murky ethics of it all because a lot of samples were never originally cleared in the beginning and there are clear legal issues at play. Then I’m feeling cagey about the Danny Hoch Taking Over show happening right now at the Kirk Douglas theater in Culver City. I wonder if he’s become a brand and if his is the brand about being the white guy that lives hip-hop as creed that tells mostly liberal white people that don’t listen to hip-hop that go to his shows why they suck for doing all this bad stuff to the black and brown folks whose teats, incidentally, he is allowed to suckle and who in return nod their heads in approval. Is that what we like because that is what we expect? And is that what we expect because we’re up on some shit about identity, politics and desire but don’t really question the rubric American Theater falls under and the political implications endemic to the industry (i.e.-filling theater seats with white butts).

But that industry is just one of many microcosms of our capitalist society and so we must ask ourselves how can we go beyond critiquing individual artists and address the real/right issue. Can’t we speak candidly about being ethical in our engagements and entanglements with authenticity? Are those unethical artistic practices by-products of fame? I am suggesting this mostly to counter the feelings of powerlessness and asshole-ness that arise when critiquing unethical artistic practices. Stealing still happens and as long as people are hungry it is going to keep happen. You still see the man claim a position that teeters between bashful and boastful about stealing people’s work and getting away with it in a recent Boing Boing video encounter between Fairey and famed street culture photographer, Glen E. Friedman. It’s all good bro’, you stole my shit and I busted you but we both ended up getting paid so it’s all good bro’. If you read the comments you’ll see something I wrote under my nom de guerre, Raquefella, to which someone promptly shoots back the Jean-Luc Godard line that Jarmusch pillows his own quote under which just tickles me.

Capitalism keeps us disconnected from art and the means of production. So instead of getting caught up trying to fight the behemoth of the brand name I have to return to the only form of consumption I know. I’m going to read the liner notes and spend time with a work of art and see if we connect. I’m going to meditate for a moment with the likes of the new Antony & The Johnsons CD or the latest book on street artist from NYC, James De La Vega and get a feeling going on some level. When I don’t have time then it’s off to the Starbucks to see what music they can spoonfeed to me because that brand is trying to corner a market on it. Too easy? Well, isn’t that what brands do?

I DON’T NEED SCHOOL TO CALL IT ART (excerpt)

( Seesaw at Jabberjaw, 1993.)
written by raquel gutierrez for the jabberjaw book

The wait was torturous and worthwhile but hearing the first chords of “Dragnalus,” a collapsed and discordant siren, made the hair on my arm stick straight up like little Watts Towers on fire. We rocked out to a Tumwater death march. This was the Fake Train tour and my first time seeing the trio that had the biggest ‘hood fame that night—the redwood, the woman, and the misanthrope. A fine bill it was with one of those line-ups that reflected the founding of a brotherhood of dysfunction, an anxious intimacy that didn’t require boys kissing each other to call it love. It was the end of summer, 1993, and Unwound’s penultimate show on tour before heading back home to Oly. Although, they were already home.

Unwound. Floodgate. Seesaw—Richard and Joey had just graduated high school. I was there with those two Downey boys that so desperately wanted to be from Olympia. Seesaw had just came back from their first West Coast tour, including a show at the Red House on Vern Rumsey’s invitation. Lucky bastards. Oh well, Richard was jealous of me for being granted access to Riot Grrl-L.A. meetings thanks to my Kunta Kinte.

This was the new macho. It was awkward cock rock. It was the invitation to smoke your older brother’s secret stash. The kind of stash that floats boat dreams from a hill. The same guys that ignored me for not catching their Jawbreaker references yet always kindly let me go in front of the stage for the seasonal Schwarzenbach-lash. When it pains it roars. Even though I didn’t like dick I still loved these guys the way a masochist loves a narcissist for letting me into the clubhouse.

I was already inaugurated into the scene with my first cappuccino in a root beer mug served by Wrecks Carrs of KXLU at the Nation of Ulysses show. He was the guy with the mushroom cloud for hair that just kept getting skinnier and snottier until his trust fund ran out. Nevertheless, he was still a kingmaker and we knew it. Maybe you knew him? He was one of many characters that the same dozen people introduced me to in a hundred different ways and he never looked me in the eye or remembered my name. That type of underground snobbery could only transpire in a place like Jabberjaw, yet it never really bothered me. Few were of that ilk. Many were there because they loved being there with the bands, the fans, the experts, the geeks, the next-in-line’s and each other. No one was ever already over it nor had we begun to take it all for granted.

Everyone that had a hand in making Jabberjaw what it was were all very nice to this nerdy stocky girl from Bell Gardens, California. Randy Kaye was a gentleman but definitely and understandably too cool for me. I didn’t know what a pin-up was until I saw Michelle. Gary was cool and inspired me to wear brown pants and black shirts and white socks as my daily uniform, Jessie always had a smile and I remember them all, along with Brian and Maureen, always being in good spirits when Godheadsilo were in town. It was definitely like a really cool family that did drugs together but would never get all Helter Skelter on you.

(Kicking Giant, year? No idea!)

Jabberjaw was still the place you came to be a jerk because you owned Steelpole Bathtub 7-inches, toasted your cinnamon raisin bread at Ships, and Steve from Slug knew your name. All of this credibility often entitled you to stand behind the counter a few feet away from Michelle. You couldn’t just be a dick in your regular everyday life to people who had no sense of the nomenclature of cool you measured your life by. You have to give it up to a place that served no alcohol yet inspired that kind of attention-seeking behavior. Maybe it was my age but all of it was just lost on me, went over my head or maybe I just wasn’t brave enough to ask—but, why pop tarts? At 30 I might have felt the slightest twinge of irony eating a pop tart. At 16, I was just fat and didn’t care because I ate chocolate pop tarts before going to school. It was my cheap ambrosia during those noisy nights. Trenchmouth, Canopy, Beekeeper, Today Is The Day, Unsane and Kicking Giant. God knows we needed the refined sugar to keep us going straight into the morning.

Testing the waters: poetry of place

It seems like there is a spectrum of feeling around the poetics of place, especially with so many Los Angeles-based blogs becoming these grand sites for radical spatial narratives. Maybe it's because I've been thinking about the different turning tides in southeast LA in the course of my life that I look for that which I want to see. Place is always a big factor in most creative works, at least it's the yin to time's yang. What an awful simile. Place and Time. Perquin, El Salvador, 1981. Mexico City, 1968. Some narratives are larger than others, but every narrative waits to be written. Our blogs serve as every day acts of resistance, a thoughtful intervention into the banality of state logic, vessels we invigorate with meaning.

I'm interested in starting a POETRY OF PLACE collaborative series at any number of spaces that are proliferating in neighborhoods we inhabit and are estranged from.

I'm doing one at galeria de la raza to test out material before doing stuff in LA. I have this crazy idea of doing quarterly events in different parts of our schizophrenic metropolis. Maybe inspiring folks to think more critically about the way they inhabit the world that they do and return the form to some kind of reportage that takes place, critical witnessing if you will. We all do it, so why not do it together?

Anyone interested in some kind of event that focuses on areas such as Boyle Heights, Alhambra, South Bay, Northeast LA, Venice, dollar you call the zip code!?

New series in the works.

Mistaking Planes For Stars: The Poetry of Place in Southeast LA
February Event for the LUNADA Series

Galeria de la Raza
Monday, February 9, 2009
7:00pm - 10:00pm
2857 24th street
San Francisco, CA
415.826.8009
info@galeriadelaraza.org

featuring Aida Salazar, Raquel Gutierrez, Vickie Vertiz, Tomas Riley and Leticia Hernandez-Linares

Come to Galeria de La Raza’s popular LUNADA series this February 2009 as three poets with origins in Maywood, Huntington Park and Bell Gardens, Califas poetically render the emotional and political architectures of Southeast Los Angeles. Veteran poets, Tomas Riley and Leticia Hernandez-Linares round out the spatial flow with harmonious and discordant narratives of north and south, San Francisco and San Diego.

The moon shines bright this night over the city and its Bay. See you there!
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The POETRY OF PLACE is a series idea I got from organizing this event at Galeria de la Raza. Now that I see what potential it has it makes me want to keep doing this series in different sites where poets and writers would focus on a particular set of places. I don't know where the next will occur after this in SF but it's got the wheels turning.

I'm looking forward to seeing Aida read at this event. I first came across her work about ten years ago, I believe at a mujer de maiz event at Self-Help Graphics. It was my first foray into witnessing smart feminist performance art. She called herself a performance artist and I thought that was so cool. Red paint was involved and she dipped her upper body in the liquid. Visually it was really jarring. Reminded me of a more hopeful Nicole Blackman (whom I first saw at the first Ladyfest in Olympia, WA around the same time).

Aida was also an arts professional and I remember her leading workshops for the county and Getty interns on how to produce a large-scale event. Man, that is some serious work but also a really exciting time for LA arts, back before all this economic standstill.

It will be fun to share the stage with her at Galeria.