Thank you, Ernest Hardy, for taking me to school and tipping me off to Medicine for Melancholy.
(*Sigh*)
Yesterday I booked it hard through the Redline to the 2 bus down Sunset in West Hollywood trying desperately to get to the 3:10pm showing of Barry Jenkins' emotional stinger of a flick at the Sunset 5. I got there on-time and waited for my friend, Shizu, to hurry up the steps. No color people time for us. We roll into Theater 3 only to be subjected to 15 more minutes of previews. So far so good. Medicine for Melancholy is a really good film with a lot of good things going for it. I highly recommend it to anyone that went and saw and thought they loved Danny Hoch's gentrification show. MfM brings the tensions around authenticity, blackness, gentrification and class to a boil in a quiet storm of unsaturated colors. There's no white guy shouting people of color characters into your already burdened consciousness with skull snaps and the utmost of hip-hop ironies in the background.
Basically, we meet Micah and Jo in the first 45 seconds coming out of their hook-up hipster hangover. How funny that it transpires between the seemingly only two black people at the white hipsters loft party--complete with a white guy wearing tight cut-off corduroy pants offering the sheepish walkers of shame some cereal before heading out. Is it the site where the category of black truly empties?
Then we see the courting session begin because boy unicorn can't let go of girl unicorn just yet. When can you be assured that you will meet another unicorn in the sad worlds of your making?
I couldn't help but wonder about their choices in clothing and gearless bicycles, thinking to myself that I, too, would like to have a track jacket with fighting roosters on it to match my tattoos. Or that I would totally date a woman that screened female directors' names on t-shirts. Am I revealing too much here?
It sort of has a "each one, teach one" vibe about it with boy identity-checking girl and girl resisting labels in such a way that will appeal to all my essentialist revolutionary peoples yet is anchored by a certain cynicism making the rounds with the more angst-riddled existentialists de colour. But it's really about two people trying to connect but end up unloading their racialized anxieties in a city where black people make up only 7% of its population.
I really enjoyed the moments where it's just the ambivalence wrapped in giggling, glances and goosebumps taking hold (on a carousel, at the organic food co-op) while society is drowned out by the music and the identity politics are temporarily shelved. The kind of moment propelled by curiosity and chemistry--those little luxuries rarely afforded to complicated people of color on film. These transcendent moments are ever ephemeral but when they occur I appreciate it because pretty soon the anger will take back the reins and I remember exactly where my place is in the already overwhelming schema.
Anyway, here's a quick excerpt taken from an interview with Barry Jenkins on blackvoices.com:
Why shoot the film in black and white?
BJ: That was one of the original discussions I had with the cinematographer, my buddy James Laxton. We wanted the visuals to portray San Francisco,and the first thing we decided to do was to capture the image that would best display the emotional mood of the characters in relation to the city of San Francisco. It's not completely black and white. It's about 93 percent saturated. In a way, it reflects the small population of African Americans in the city. There is some color in the film, when the characters are being more intimate and are talking about politics and race.
I often forget that Shizu is from San Francisco/Mission District and post-film and over garden burgers she shared her own frustrations with a city that has no place for kids of color trying to listen to Bloodcat Love and Oh No! Oh My! amongst their own. It is hard not to feel blessed (for lack of a better affective state) to live in Los Angeles, where you could find and make a ghetto in your own image, readjusting the center to reflect the true majority. Shizu and I both agreed that the music was pretty phenomenal and that it would suck to only get to enjoy it in white-dominated spaces.
I am really excited to see Medicine for Melancholy. It is known as the black hipster flick by Barry Jenkins, set in San Francisco between two unicorns and it opens in Los Angeles tomorrow. I saw Ernest Hardy’s review of it and put that ish on my calendar.
In the meantime I’ve been thinking about hipsters. I have been this way for about a month now way after the backlash. I feel like Mexico still wearing acid wash jeans and fauxhawks. I’ve been thinking about hipsters of color. And when I put those two together—hipster and of color—the divergence between those terms appears far, wide and laden in clarity. Oxymoronic? I don’t want to have to go into making keywords for theory here but put simply I believe that what bugs most people about hipsters is the hipster’s blatant disavowal of economic justice. Whereas a self-determined modifier such as of color announces itself to be fully aware of the historical implications of the societal context it finds itself existing and enduring. You know, consciousness. Not just a Black Star album, but having the lights on in every part of the house so you can see exactly who and what is coming in and going out, socially speaking of course.
Of course I have also been thinking about white hipsters. I feel so passé admitting this but you can’t have a concept like hipster of color and not go to the source of contention. So different yet on some levels it ends up being the same—is a hipster always a hipster? Or is the grating of our political nerves struck differently at different political timbres? Do white hipsters bug you the way black and brown ones do? Is it all class-based?
There is so much hipster hatred going on right now in the many worlds I inhabit—both blogosphere and the physical, critical and creative communities made up of the artist-activist-academic peoples—the humble, broke-ass kind. Many hate the hipster’s entitlement over our gardens and taquerias. Immigrants and their kinship networks have suddenly fanned their own isolationist impulses against spoon-fed outsiders. A bad scene, everyone's fault.
(And when I say hatred I mean it in the hateration sense, not any hate crime sense—but you knew that, right?)
Anyway…
It began to crystallize here—a few weeks ago I caught the Danny Hoch Taking Over show here in Los Angeles in one of the city’s western pockets called Culver City. The show was basically hip-hop theater’s most prominent hustler, Danny Hoch, telling the audience that the changes in the last twelve years in all of New York and its (un)real estate development is ruining an otherwise economically depressed yet thoroughly authentic Williamsburg (a neighborhood where Hoch owns property). A solo performance about gentrification—get it? Hipsters are ruining everything. They’re cannibals. They attract families with children and the authenticity of poor and working class folks of color gets siphoned into the outer suburban areas.
Now I know—a big theater touring production that breaks down the ills and powerlessness against gentrification is a positive contribution to educating theater patrons, the kind that can afford to drop a wad of cash to nod off in the middle of the show. But what I can’t get with is Hoch’s equal assailing of white and black hipsters. Somehow he thinks they belong to the same branch of evil. But white hipster is not a black hipster is not a brown hipster.
What bugs me about that is that I get the feeling that hipsterism is somehow an indicator of whitewashing—that somehow the person of color engaging in hipster-like activities is somehow less authentic than someone participating in hip-hop culture. And that a neighborhood’s coolness depends on the authenticity of its inhabitants of color. It feels like you’re less a person and more cool-kid accoutrement for those trying to pass as urban and down.
I have my own gentrification narrative and feel somewhat self-conscious by all things hipster, simply by the way I have been consuming music, politics and culture for the last fifteen years. They have always been around me in different degrees—some have politics, others want to know what’s up in music, cheap eats, new designers, etc. They linger like carrion birds, waiting for bits of flesh. For the most part a lot of them I’ve known through art and music, but back then I used to identify these people as scenesters. But because we have inhabited similar spaces for so long I sometimes feel compelled to be a cultural broker between scenesters and those whose spaces they encroach upon. What a burden, especially because most of the time they don’t want to be bothered. That’s when I realize that I’m progressive and they’re liberal. They only like Animal Collective and Glenn Branca. I like Animal Collective, Glenn Branca and Chavela Vargas and Betty Davis. They’re never going to go the extra mile.
My self-consciousness also comes because I know I operate under a mix of hipster trappings, such as the actual aesthetic I impose upon my own brown queer female with alternative gender presentation to the world. I, of course, could never be a hipster—I’m too stocky, too butch, too brown. I get mistaken for the nanny. I translate for janitors. I’m too goddamn earnest. I wear Dickies and thrift-store clothes but have been doing that since I was a kid, going shopping with my mother. How stoked was she that she didn’t have to spend money on me when I wasn’t wearing a catholic school uniform. I do understand from experience and from reading practices that there are lots of people of color that choose to overlook identity particularities or not engage them actively.
Like M. Ward for instance. Homeboy's from Ventura, Califas and born of a Mexican mother but does he engage child of immigrant angst in any of his intelligent folk music? No, he doesn't have to and that's what bugs. Sure his music is cool but when you're a listener bringing in your own context politicized as a person of consciousness. It's hard to not feel some level of alienation considering that the artist in question doesn't have to--I guess that's what makes the hipster litmus test.
So a film like Medicine for Melancholy seems like a nice and complicated counterpoint to the reductive reads of black and brown kids listening to rock as being byproducts of self-loathing. Here are characters self-conscious about those trappings. I feel of course very strange and conflicted about growing up liking punk and indie rock and most rock, a lot of it by white artists. I ride a bike and eat organic, watch indie films and all that other cliché stuff that for the last fifteen years hasn’t felt like a cliché but just choices in consumption. I feel somewhat entitled to it all since I’ve worked hard to access independent circuits of cultural production but I’m also down to watch an hour’s worth of Nancy Grace and the latest Will Smith flick with my parents and extended family.
(the author as a young queer, circa 1994)
But, what about me? I already know about the ills of gentrification. I have been concerned with it for a long time. I moved out of my parents’ Bell Gardens home in 1998 when I was 22 to move to a neighborhood that was not West Hollywood, where I could be Latina and into queercore and riot grrl and dykes and music and musicians, pay cheap rent to boot. I lived and learned and loved on Bellevue and Benton for five years, in an apartment being vacated by two fifty-something white coupled working class lesbians that were moving near Lake Tahoe to have a little piece of the world with their names on it. The window on the door had a decal with a unicorn encircled by a rainbow back before that shit was ironic.
I patronized all the queer Latino establishments—Dreams on Sunday at Spaceland, Club Nayarit for their Klub Fantasy nights, Escandalo at the Axis in West Hollywood, Le Barcito for a night out with the queens, Silverlake Lounge and the Garage Sunday nights, Tempo on Santa Monica Boulevard, Little Joy’s way back when, Jalisco Inn when The Smell became unbearable and Woody’s before it became MJ’s. I’d go here when the cute mod girls only dated other cute mod girls. It became impossible to be singly and mingly at hetero-dominated clubs like Café Bleu and Velvet.
I worked in a range of surreal music industry jobs and having my consciousness raised thanks to music; made friends with community based artists and organizers, particip ated in youth-centered political projects, and was conflicted about musicians with big label forlorn. I worked and then quit my full-time job as an “e-commerce coordinator” for an online music label right as the Internet bubble was about to burst and returned full-time to college, getting a degree from Cal State Northridge in the lovely San Fernando Valley. And this whole time one of my three roommates that shared the 2-bedroom, paid less than $435 a month from a mostly data entry job.
You could make music, see poets, buy chapbooks, make a nice little DiY-community, and there was one around the MacArthur Park/Westlake neighborhoods. Café Luna y Sol was possibly at the epicenter for a while there, when I lived just a block north of the 101. I caught Manu Chao’s midnight acoustic performance secret show there with fifty other Xicanos, as well as Jerry Quickley’s open mic night every other Wednesday. It was a time when tofu tacos inspired you to do a double take.
In 2003 I moved from Silverlake to New York for one year to pursue a shot at academia, wondering if all my denouncement of corporate structures could translate into grad school idealism. This is how I would serve the movement—as an intellectual.
A year later, I found myself returning to that very neighborhood only to find unaffordable housing with an entry-level job’s salary. A job I have been at for four years and my salary hasn’t changed much. Did I mention I work at a private university? It’s funny in that embittered kind of way but my working in the penumbra of the intellectual industrial complex mirrors my music industry working period—I pursued these jobs to be close to entities I love: music and theory.
Hey, I have an idea to counter my growing feelings of powerlessness against gentrification! Let’s do queer performance! I saw Vaginal Crème Davis open for the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black at 18 at Jabberjaw, I know what I’m doing! And that doesn’t make me a hipster—that makes me a tragically jerky fanatic, Jack Black’s Barry from High Fidelity, if you will.
And I like and will take my theater uncritically in most instances consuming the catharsis the way I would a Tommy’s chiliburger—I know it’s bad for me but it feels pretty damn good because it is so easy. So I wish I could be totally hipster about it and embrace Hoch’s inhabitation of character of color, but I can’t. And when I am not reducing my critical metaphors to Barry’s self-righteous outburst about Mitch Ryder vs. the Righteous Brothers in the clip above, I am actually engaging in an act of resistance against a white person professionally performing people of color on stage.
I can’t get with that—call it a difference of political opinion if you can. I cringe because there are so many black and brown educated young theater and spoken word cats that I see at his show nodding their heads in approval.
From time to time I get contacted by the great programmers of queer performance here and around Los Angeles asking if I could get the word out about upcoming projects and events. So this week, in addition to my upcoming blogging about live shows I've caught in the last six days, you will be seeing posts related to events happening that maybe you should go check out. I'm checking them out, maybe I'll see you there.
Highways is doing a big FROM THE MARGINS event/artist exchange with folks from Los Angeles and San Francisco. The weekend features a milieu of identities from the queer spectrum in what I imagine is an earnest attempt at cross-pollinating audiences and minds. If you're still bleeding for queer theory and/or want to break out and experience some actual praxis then head over to FROM THE MARGINS and enjoy your outsider street cred or for those who used to be soccer moms you can get some here.
I'm really excited to see Scott Turner Schofield, newly moved to the great metropolis. I know homeboy is probably still adjusting to the big city lights and taco trucks and probably missing sugar in his tea and hoping Nickelodeon will call his ass back one of these days. But in the meantime he's going to represent Los Angeles in this Highways/Queer Cultural Center artist exchange. I'm not sure what he'll be presenting, but Turner's milkshake always brings out the cutest questioning corn-fed college-bound bois and femmes to his yard. If you haven't seen this charmer in action then save your pennies and get to Highways and check his shit out.
Same with Gigi Otalvaro Hormillosa. She is so way overdue for a performance in Los Angeles it's not even funny. Gigi was one of the first artists Tongues promoted back in that identity-driven moment. She's the devil bunny and has been nesting in her hellhole for far too long methinks but I'm happy she's making the trek down. For all you vagina-come-latelies Gigi's work is a must for critical consumption. Gigi does really heady, complicated post-identitarian projects these days, gay marriage cheer routines that are infused with clever gestures to race and class, and making general creepy performance art that probably triggers many a sensitive over-educated queer woman of color. Personally, I can't wait to get triggered. I've been feeling awfully comfortable these days and I could use a good disturbance to shake me out of my smug zombie state.
Check out the info and rest of the performer bios below:
Highways Presents 8 LGBTQ Performers in From the Margins, a Radical New Works
+++Friday and Saturday, March 6 + 7, 2009 at 8:30 p.m. +++Sunday, March 8, 2009 at 3:00 p.m.
Highways Presents the Los Angeles presentation of a four-city tour of Fringes-Margins-Borders featuring L.A.’s Queer Exchange: Deadlee, Ian MacKinnon, Saleem, and guest artist Scott Turner Schofield + San Francisco Artists: Stephanie Cooper, Sean Dorsey Dance, and Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa.
Fringes-Margins-Borders is a multidisciplinary performance project of new works drawn from personal narratives designed to initiate community across artificially and socially constructed identity divides. For the tour, Highways is partnering with San Francisco’s Queer Cultural Center and San Diego’s Sushi Performance and Visual Art.
L.A. Artists: Deadlee is a wordsmith, actor, activist, and entrepreneur. Gay.com's Josh Tager said: "Like many of his rap peers, Deadlee's albums are intense, writhing outbursts of anger. The notable distinction here is that when Deadlee bashes, he's bashing back. He is a vigilante for social justice, committed to confronting homophobia wherever he sees it."
Ian MacKinnon is a gay centered performance artist and curator of queer theater events in Los Angeles. He was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for "Best Off Off Broadway Performance" for his piece, SPANKED! at the New York International Fringe Festival, which he also toured to The New Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. Locally he has performed all over: Highways Performance Space, The Hammer Museum, The Electric Lodge, The Cavern Club, The Coast Playhouse, Theater Theatre, El Cid, Dragonfly, The Celebration Theatre, The Davidson/Valentini and The Renberg Theatre at the Gay and Lesbian Center.
Saleem is an award wining Middle Eastern performance artist, best known for his GLAAD award wining play Salam Shalom A Tale Of Passion, a love story between an Arab man and a Jewish man based on his own biography, the work is being developed as a film. As a dancer, he has developed his own dancing style, which incorporates Middle Eastern dance, gypsy movements, flamenco, and jazz. This mélange produces what he terms “free style belly dancing.”
Scott Turner Schofield is a man who was a woman, a lesbian turned straight guy who is often called a fag. Since 2001, Schofield's three major works, Underground Transit, Debutante Balls, and Becoming a Man in 127 EASY Steps - as well as readings from his book, Two Truths and a Lie - have entertained feminists and fratboys, season subscribers and people who “don't like theater” in big cities and small towns across the US.
San Francisco Artists: Sean Dorsey is an award-winning San Francisco-based choreographer and dancer. Recognized as the nation’s first out transgender modern dance choreographer, Dorsey has blazed a new trail for transgender and queer bodies and stories onstage.
The consummate candy-fag, Thisway/Thatway (aka Stephanie Cooper) is an intermedia performance artist who enjoys the messy collision of glitter and theory. They launched into performance with the finest of Washington, DC's drag king and burlesque scene before wandering to the Bay area. The child of Black-Panamanian immigrants, their work explores the perils and possibilities of interstitial spaces through voice, video, and movement.
Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa, also known as the Devil Bunny in Bondage, is a San Francisco based interdisciplinary performance artist, video artist, cultural activist, curator and percussionist of Filipino and Colombian descent. She is originally from Miami, Florida and received her B.A. from Brown University where she created an independent concentration entitled "Hybridity and Performance."
Highways Performance Space at the 18th Street Arts Center 1651 18th Street; Santa Monica, CA 90404
Tickets are $20 general admission and $15 for members/students/seniors. Buy your tickets online @ www.highwaysperformance.org. Call 310-315-1459 for show information and to reserve
PS - IF YOU READ THIS AND WANT TO GO THEN MENTION RAQUEFELLA TO GET A PAY WHAT YOU CAN DISCOUNT AT HIGHWAYS. ORALE, AND YOU THOUGHT THIS WAS A STRICTLY NARCISSISTIC PROJECT...
Sometimes I am hard on San Francisco. Why? Is it the ubiquity of Giants caps and jackets that is responsible for my discomfort? Nah, orange and black are just as pretty to look at as Dodger blue and white. The thing that makes me like Bay Area folks is that we like our poetry real and raw and that is how we cooked it February 9th at a spot you may or may not be familiar with called Galeria de La Raza.
San Francisco becomes the site to do an event centering on the poetics of Southeast Los Angeles, particularly the Hub Cities known as the stretch between Vernon, Huntington Park, Bell Gardens, Bell, Maywood and Cudahy, mainly because two of the three from SELA now call the Bay home. Our job was to render these places for the folks that made it out to MPFS. One of the goals I have for this poetry of place series is to give people a chance to voice their critical observations of how space shapes our sense of self as well as how displacement and gentrification continues to produce anxieties about how we inhabit the neighborhoods we might have taken for granted. No judgment there intended when I say take for granted. It's just sometimes we are so accustomed to a way our neighborhood ought to function that we often only notice who and what is coming in versus who and what is leaving. I want to create a space where we can speak openly together in lieu of and addition to tapping into strange impulses like be the sole voice for a community as a way to protect our territories.
Anyway, I wanted to just take a minute to give the Bay Area its due justice for a wonderful night of place-oriented poetry. Does that make sense? It was the Poetry of Place of Southeast Los Angeles with some top to bottom from San Francisco and San Diego to remind us why California can be a maddening, magical and melancholic place for lovelorn Latina/os and messed up mestizo/as. Thanks to my poet friends that came through to read on a bill that complemented such a beautiful moonlit albeit freezing night in the Mission District.
Here we have Marc Pinate quieting and preparing the masses for a night of palabra. Marc performed several songs throughout the night. He used to sing for a San Jose band called Grito Serpentino. The man's voice is really pretty.
Vickie Vertiz is here, reading an excerpt of her novel in progress about two pre-teens living and learning in the big BG, Bell Gardens. Vickie is my co-conspirator for this event and she actually grew up right around the corner from me, near the corner of Loveland and Eastern. She lives in the city now and I didn't meet her until a few months ago at this Latino arts empowerment gathering in downtown Los Angeles. Vickie was the glitter glue that kept us all in touch and hope we can do this again!
We had a lot of great folks roll through to participate in the open mic portion of the Lunada's program. It was so great to finally see Lito Sandoval of Gay Latino performance ensemble of the late 90s and early 2000s, Latin Hustle fame do a piece that night. He is a fabulous writer and an engaging as all hell performer. Read more Lito and often! Tomas Riley and Leticia Hernandez were two of the five features. The duo are poetry dreams come true. I have cut my teeth on their work and feel really special to have them in my and be a part of their family. They are responsible for statewide unity by bridging NoCal and SoCal together. Tomas as you and your mother knows used to be the heart of Taco Shop Poets and Leticia has curated the powerful and inspiring Pinta Tu Propio Mundo poetry of mujer feroz project now pushing almost ten years. Umm, anthology anyone? Yosimar Reyes from San Jose, Califas came up during the open mic and did his piece on what does not make you conscious. I love it, so Bay Area. Young Yosi has a new book of work called For Colored Boys Who Speak Softly. Check out his truth spitting here. Aida Salazar, homegrown in Maywood, Califas, was the last featured writer. She read the crushing tales of bones and panty thieves, home and obsession. It was a treat to read with her because she is amazing and not many in Los Angeles get to do it. I guess she's like a prose unicorn ya know? Aida was a major contributor to the art scene in Los Angeles, producing large events for the likes of Maldita Vecindad and Quetzal for our serious cultural consumption. She's also a performance artist and writer schooled serio pedo styles at Cal Arts and is currently writing a memoir on some very personal experiences about motherhood.
Trust that you'll see her, Vickie and I in Los Angeles telling a tale about other architectures of the Southeast.
It's so easy to get caught up in the beauty of another city especially when they have superior pupusas. But at the end of it all I was really happy to come home to my town and put my head on a familiar lap and pillow. Here's a pic I snapped on my way home from LAX. The poetry of place...coming to LOS ANGELES.
I always stress the things I will miss when I go out of town. This weekend I will be missing Lysa Flores performing with her trio at the aptly titled Latina Dance Project at the Bootleg Theater in the neighborhood adjacent to where I currently call home, Historic Filipinotown.
This event features an array of locally based dance and movement artists performing choreographed new works to Lysa’s music.
My girlfriend and I went down a few weeks ago to check out Lysa perform live at the organic punk rock girl empowerment camp known otherwise as Ladyfest LA. We were the oldest participants in the audience at the Chuco Justice Center in Inglewood. I really wanted to see Lysa perform in this environment and it was such a treat to see all these young teenage girls vibe off her music. It is so gratifying to see young female-bodied folks discovering new underground feminist aesthetics and practices that don’t conform to messed up societal expectations. The way the light goes on behind their eyes that another world is truly possible. It helps when the shit rocks and Lysa Flores, with backup from Jaguares bassist (and baby daddy) Marcos Renteria and fly LA percussionist, Fredo Ortiz, fucking rocked.
I caught up with Lysa and asked her what she was working on next and she mentioned this dance performance coming up. What an interesting concept—cross-disciplinary collaboration! Stuff like this enables Lysa’s artistic and autonomous sustainability outside an unmerciful commercial market that makes unfair demands on women.
I have to admit that I am a big Lysa Flores fanboi. Her music puts a big shit-eating grin on my face, which is funny to me now because back in my identity politicking daze I could not wrap my head around her music. I guess mostly because I don’t like nor can I appreciate Ani DiFranco and Lysa used to do a lot of fucked up acoustic guitar strumming songs that just struck my lesbian nerves the wrong way. Now I love “Beg, Borrow and Steal” which is a song from the best Latino film ever, Miguel Arteta’s Star Maps. Remember Lysa’s role as the tortured daughter of a creep pimp? Soul-crushing. (Lysa Flores performs at Pinta tu Propio Mundo, San Francisco, 2007)
Late last year I had the pleasure of being on a poetry bill curated by my friend, Leticia Hernandez Linares, that put me side by side with Lysa in San Francisco. It was the Pinta Tu Propio Mundo event and she blew away the crowd with her cherry red Stratocaster and songs about being a Mexican white girl. I thought to myself: Self, why isn’t Lysa Flores fucking world famous? Oh, the injustice.
Try and catch Lysa and friends at Bootleg this Saturday, February 7 if you can swing it. I will be preparing for the Mistaking Planes for Stars event happening Monday at Galeria de la Raza in the Mission District of San Francisco. Tell a friend if you can.
Today is the day. After seven long years of waiting and suffering in silence, Los Super Elegantes release their second full-length album, Nothing Really Matters. A band that has been thankfully evasive about describing what they do to whomever comes to their oeuvre proving that labels especially have never really mattered.
Check out the first video, filmed and photoshopped on location in Athens, Greece.
I have been pressing my nose against the digital window today since I have to wait until the 12th of this month for my emusic.com downloads to refresh. Hey man, I haven't seen a promo CD since my snot-nosed heyday working for industry tipsheet and pre-bubble bursting dot-com-landia so I have to be a monk sometimes in my musical consumption. But trust me when I say I have been jamming to those 30-second samples like nobody's business.
Anyway, I am really happy. This band, this duo of unequaled madness y sabor, one of my favorite Los Angeles bands ever, have delivered another set of gems for the queer undereducated masses in today’s fiercest threads to bump and grind to. Bump and grind in the drug use context, honey, not the sex acts.
This is what you listen to while you blow-dry your bangs for a night that will leave you wallowing in full-throttle chale! in lieu of regret the morning after. If you don’t drink, goody two-shoes, then turn to the wisdom of Martiniano y Milena for blatant social lubrication.
I first saw LSE at Saint Lucy’s, a girl punk-driven venue adjacent to Fais Do Do, and I think they were on the same bill as The Need. It was like all the cultural confusion of my interiority was catalyzed by these fresas and their punk rock pipiripau. My brown kid anguish of being invisible in a dirty white girl punk scene responded to the Super Elegante dog whistle and I haven’t let go of this bone yet.
Even as I got caught up in identity politics in college and being a better Latina that does everything for free, there was always Los Super Elegantes to turn to when the limitations of labels just became too much psychic burnout. The band tends to get a bad rap from small Chicana/o fundamentalist groups that deem the group apolitical. But the picture of Milena below tells me something different.
("EVERY HUMAN BEING IS SUPER ELEGANTE" - LSE)
LSE have been written about up the wazoo in every single imaginable publication. And they have consistently been described so clumsily, and if I read another gesture towards mariachi-hip-hop-punk I'm putting a fork to my eye. Yes, a band that does performance art—how…radical! But man, wasn’t it a thrill to see these cats at the Whitney Biennial the only year I ever lived in New York. It felt satisfying to no end to see the most provincially-attituded biggest center of the world acknowledge the amazingness of Los Angeles-based duo, M y M.
It was thrilling to see a couple of artists whose work I connected with enough to want to write about them early on in their careers do well and succeed in these fickle times. I wrote the cover story on LSE for the long defunct Frontera magazine back in 2001—my first and only cover story to date. It was in this feature that I called these two militant dilettantes, which I think is the best description ever for them. Last summer I ran into Martiniano on the dancefloor of a downtown Los Angeles club called Shits N’Giggles where he remembered me and gave me a really sweet hug. I asked him how his abs were doing and he said he had gotten so flabby in typical super elegante fashion. He also mentioned how my article helped LSE reach new levels. Maybe there’s some journalistic ethical concern I’m missing here but hearing that made my night.
(*Thanks to Jens Lekman, Swedish singer-songwriter, for penning such a great musical homage to RLD.)
This week I owe journalist Daniel Hernandez my gratitude for bringing Rocky Dennis back in to my emotional motherboard and pop cultural imaginary. Hernandez, of course, being the writer whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the LA Weekly, is poised to have a successful career in journalism. Rocky and Rusty Dennis are of course the real life folks that inspired the film Mask. Rocky Dennis was a boy with a disfiguring disorder called craniodiaphyseal dysplasia that caused his head to grow to twice its normal size, and his mother, a biker named Rusty, was determined he live a normal life.
Mask, or I should say Rocky’s likeness as rendered wonderfully by Eric Stoltz, became a perplexing footnote in DH’s either ambiguous putdown or passive aggressive come-on to my friend, Dino Dinco, who just opened a solo exhibition of his multimedia work in San Francisco.
The blog post was written under his nom de gay on another person’s art blog and it sounds like it is promoting the exhibit but I am not entirely sure. This blog in particular goes over my head with the psychically violent esoteric references that I gather are supposed to be somehow ironic. It’s like if Patsy from Ab-Fab was Latina, on Adderall and art theory, and emboldened to be racist and messed up so her mean gay rich white friends would like her better. In DH’s post however I cannot help but read his insertion of Rocky Dennis image above Dino’s image as ill-intentioned. Was it supposed to insinuate that he was an ugly freak? Or a lovable, brilliant, funny guy cut from working class cloth and dearly loved within his own biker kinfolk and the people that meet him today.
I am going to go with the latter because if Dino Dinco is Rocky Dennis then hooray for my ability to judge characters.
One of the first memories I have of living in my Bell Gardens barrio was of seeing movie trucks around the corner from where we lived. My mom walked us to the little corner park on Loveland Street and Eastern Avenue to see production assistants milling about the motorcycle garage across the street. Harley Davidsons would roar up and down, too, and these burly hairy guys would be hanging out waiting for their next scene. Later the following year when my parents took my sister and I to see Mask at the Fiesta Drive-In in Pico Rivera we realized it was Mask that had been filmed and Bell Gardens was supposed to be Azusa in the 1970s.
I believe that Rocky Dennis was an affable young kid that took the time to get to know people because he saw the inner good of the world around him and that his mother, Rusty, did the best she could in fighting the institutional indifference rampant in medical and educational spheres. A classic underdog story.
I find the film itself terribly satisfying even if it does fall prey to Hollywood hyperbole. Nevertheless, there is something terribly raw about a mother who turns to Quaaludes and handlebar mustaches when unconditional love becomes unbearable. I also find it brutally sweet when tough biker dudes kick into high paternal mode when the red-haired monster boy is in trouble or ridiculed by the world at large. A kid like Rocky inspires men weathered by life to be something other than what their caste dictates them to be—gentle.
More importantly, however, my friendship with Dinco and Hernandez’ post both prompt me to think through a personal trajectory scattered with different levels of amiability I have had with white people. Just like Rocky D’s own coping strategy of thinking of something good when something bad happens, I too think of my good interactions with white people to counter all the negatives ones that persist at my sanity. I am reminded of the poor and working class white people, particularly, the children and grandchildren of the Gran Torinos of that microcosm we inhabited in the Hub Cities of Southeast Los Angeles.
I remember Tommy Barton and his big ass ID bracelet, freckles and blonde hair in our kindergarten class at Colmar Elementary in Bell Gardens. I was one of the few Latina kids that spoke English pretty well so I got to be in his class and be chaperoned by his super mean mom that looked like Aileen Wuornos. She smoked Doral cigarettes in the playground while us kids ate lunch. Tommy would occasionally get picked up by a long-haired blonde man riding a motorcycle, this before helmet laws. My older brother had a motorcycle too and would let me ride on that back of his Kawasaki when I was 5. Tommy and I would talk shop about it.
Then when I switched schools there was Amanda Novak, one of the few white girls at Saint Rose of Lima in Maywood. She was straight off of a Holly Hobbie lunchbox who kept to herself but the Mexican and Cuban boys would torment her so badly she finally went off and shook one of them by the hair so hard I thought she was going to snap his pencil-thin neck. Gangster. We were both in an honors literature class so I knew she was writing a book in seventh grade and into all of the Little House in the Big Woods books—two things I was also doing, but I had a survivor’s instinct that went deep so I never wholeheartedly befriended her. I was too vulnerable myself as a nerdy honors student to risk social pariah status.
Then there’s Katie O’Donnell, white girl with a thick Huntington Park barrio accent that liked punk rock and kicked it with Mexicans into Brit-pop. I secretly enjoyed her and her punk girl gang taunting my friend, the bourgeois Chicano boy from Downey’s upper echelons, after he had broken her heart with such typical lame boy callousness.
Many come from the kind of life where it is nothing but the taps on a chin, getting looked down on by rich folks with alligators on their shirts, losing their factory jobs, fighting against the yellow man—the burdens described in many a Bruce Springsteen song (whom Rocky Dennis loved by the way) as well as Los Tigres del Norte. Both artists open up different aspects of my child of immigrant sensitivities—I remember blasting the emotional heat of Born in the U.S.A on my Walkman headphones to temper the self-loathing from those untamed Tigre accordions in “La Puerta Negra” spilling out of my parents’ van stereo. A typical soundtrack for many road trips to Baja California just so my mother and father could see dentists and doctors and buy cheap medicine in Tijuana and Rosarito.
Diles por "hay" a tu padre y madre, que si ellos nunca el amor gozaron, y si se amaban tambien la puerta, la puerta negra, se la cerraron.
Others might manage to improve their station in life and go beyond a pre-destination and get to another place, make a different world beyond the values systems of our Reagan Democratic parents. I speculate if people of working class backgrounds feel it easy to reject white privilege since it might feel like none of it exists. I say this only because sometimes I feel strong enough to reject my oppression because it might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course these are just my utopic musings of an otherwise complicated mixed consciousness that would incite rage in your run-of-the-mill tenderhearted leftist reactionary. The by-product of that being an inexplicable resentment of all white people without recognizing the large handful doing their best to resist their privilege and make a better world free of racist and economically unequal bullshit by organizing their communities or raising their own mixed-race babies.
Does that mean there are good whites and bad crackers? I don’t know but I would expect and take offense and totally understand if anyone rendered me an apologist. Candy-assed, sure, but I apologize for no one. Maybe I am just hyper aware of all the complicated sites I inhabit. Maybe the 90s made it impossible to avoid these observations. Maybe I’m tired of being burdened by anger. Maybe it will be different for the generations that follow. Maybe I am tired of putting up walls when I really want new thresholds to cross.
All I know is that are white folks in my life for good reasons, many with experiences that parallel my own. They hail from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, North Carolina’s Appalachians, Reseda, California and beyond. I think about the circumstances that have made them accessible to me, which leads me to think more about the kinds of white people available to people of color. Not just funky white people, who seems to be shorthand for lame Djembe-drum playing types, but the barrio and ghetto white folks that contribute to our sense of self and belonging to the worlds of our making, some that even go without usurping them for their own gain. Shit, even Santana had a white homeboy that served as his right-hand man in the making of La Eme in American Me.
White people. You guys get a bad rap. I say that with irony and earnestness. I get it. You get it.
I leave you with this poem written by the real Rocky L. Dennis himself that leaves me somewhat feeling less burdened by the identity game:
These things are good: Ice cream and cake, A ride on a Harley, Seeing monkeys on a tree, The rain on my tongue, And the sun shining on my face.
These things are a drag: Dust on my hair, Holes in my shoes, No money in my pocket, And the sun shining on my face.
Thank you, Ernest Hardy, for taking me to school and tipping me off to Medicine for Melancholy.
