Writing Archive: 2006 Journal Archives

December 27, 2006

EDITOR'S NOTE: When I called my dad on Christmas, he mentioned James Brown's passing, and I could tell by his voice that he was feeling the holiday blues. He told me a story about trying to get into a JB concert, and I asked him to write it up for my journal. So here's my dad's memorial to James Brown, a rock-show recollection.

GOODBYE GFOS
—by Benjamin Ortiz, Sr.

James Brown. He has been called The Godfather of Soul, Mr. Dynamite, Soul Brother No. 1, The Hardest Working Man In Show Business, and many other things. To me he has been the magical music man, an inspiration.

His first hit song, “Please, Please, Please,” came out when I was a young kid, so he has always been there in music, as long as I can remember. When my sister’s boys Richy and Roy were real young and little, they loved to imitate James Brown. They used to do that crazy, fast, foot-shuffling slide, with spinning and splits, like James Brown was so well known for. I couldn’t do the “James Brown.” My feet couldn’t move fast enough.

Then, in the summer of 1967, between my junior and senior high school years when I lived in Kansas, James Brown was coming to town. The buzz in all of Wichita was about the concert at the Wichita State University arena. It had been a long, hot summer. There had been race riots in Wichita, but things had cooled down. And now, everybody wanted to go to that show.

I was washing dishes at a Mexican restaurant, and I couldn’t afford to get tickets. On the big night, my friend Carlos Salazar and I were riding around, trying to find something to do. I told him, “let’s go to the concert arena and just hang out.” We had to park blocks away, and it was a good hike, so when we got there the concert was already about half-way through.

This arena has some big glass windows and doors, so we could look in and see the people (including some of our friends) walking around the back of the center stage where the show was going on. We walked around to one of back side-doors and stood there for a while. I saw Reggie Hernandez, a good friend, inside with some other dudes.

I went up and banged on the glass door to get Reggie’s attention. He saw me, and through the crack between the doors, I yelled: “Hey Reggie, how is the concert going?” He yelled back, “It is WILD!” He made the smoking-a-joint sign and said, “The girls are going crazy!” I thought, “Oh man, I wish I was in there!” We used to think: James Brown would get all of the girls hot, then it would be easy to pick one of them up.

I started banging on the doors and acting crazy. Then, a big white security guard came to the door. I had not noticed that there were about 12 other kids that had followed me who were also trying to get in. I thought that this security guard was going to give me a “thumping” and chase us off.

As the guard came to the door, we all took a couple of steps back. He opened the door and said, “Now, if I let you all in, will you promise to behave yourselves?!” We all said in unison, “Hell yeah!” He answered, “Well, then, go in there and find a seat, and please behave yourselves.” We said, “Sure man!”

We ran in to where we could get a view. The place was packed, and there wasn’t a seat to be found, but nobody was sitting down. The place was jumping — it was electrifying!

I forgot all about the girls, ’cause there he was, on stage putting on a great show, the Man Himself, Mr. James Brown. I wasn’t very close to the stage, but I could see the spotlights were on him.

He looked like a beautiful Chocolate Man, with beads of sweat pouring down his face. He danced like a wild man, just floated across the stage, spinning, and doing signature foot shuffling and splits. He was magnificent! And I was captivated by him. His singing was unintelligible, all yelling and screams, but his voice was like music.

Then, towards the end of the show, he did his famous finale, where he sings “Bewildered” or “Please, Please, Please” (I can’t remember which), and he gets down on his knees, like he is tired and worn out. (Believe me, any other human would have been!) Then an assistant comes out, puts a cape on his back, and helps him to his feet; he walks off like he has had it. Then, he would throw off the cape, come back, and start singing again! He did this several times, and the crowd went wild. At the end of the show I was tired of yelling, jumping, and clapping.

This man not only inspired me, but he has also influenced our country, its music and performers. He was an innovator. Many artists, from Michael Jackson to Mick Jagger, and all of R&B, Rap, and Hip-Hop, were influenced by James Brown.

It wasn’t until I moved to Augusta, Georgia (his childhood hometown) that I found out about the other side of Mr. James Brown. He was also a true humanitarian. Every Thanksgiving, he gave away turkeys and fixings to make a complete Thanksgiving dinner for the less fortunate of the Augusta area. Just last Friday, December 22, he got up out of his sick bed to make an appearance at his 15th annual toy giveaway, when Christmas gifts are given to Augusta’s poor kids.

So, the Augusta area will not only miss the Man and his music, but will also miss his generosity. Here in Augusta, we remember him with James Brown Boulevard, James Brown Square (where his statue stands), and the James Brown Arena.

And the grateful people here will miss their Favorite Son and Hometown Hero.

—Photos and text by Sr., copyediting by Jr.—

Above: Ortiz and the James Brown Square statue at Augusta, GA.

December 24, 2006

Z3: DEAD BY XMAS

On this holly jolly eve, I'll be watching my favorite of the George Romero cycle, Dawn of the Dead, as I doze off to envisage shopping malls besieged the day after Christmas by bloodthirsty hordes of fetid, vicious ghouls. (Zombies, not shoppers.)

As night slips away into the lawn-display glory of Feliz Navidad, I think not about birth but living death, on an international scale. My Christmas tale: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (NY: Crown Publishers, September 2006), by Max Brooks.

Of course, this all sounds less dramatic when I admit that the author is a former SNL writer and the son of comedian Mel Brooks. Surely, his 2003 how-to manual, The Zombie Survival Guide, is the stuff of mockumentary humor, like a FEMA plan for the unthinkable: here's how to fortify your house against, kill, and dispose of the living dead when they start coming back to feed on people.

The jacket of his latest book, World War Z, boasts that the Guide "formed the core of the world's civilian survival manuals during the Zombie War." Mimicking a work of nonfiction, WWZ takes the zombie apocalypse as a journalistic subject full of gravitas, with such acknowledgments as, "Some of the numerical and factual material contained in this edition was previously published under the auspices of the United Nations Postwar Commission."

This is where WWZ takes the zombie-mockumentary premise beyond a novelty gag, referencing also the pioneering "oral history" work of legendary Chicago journalist Studs Terkel. Like Terkel's interview portraiture of individual Americans in their own memorable, inflected voices, WWZ tries to capture the first-hand narratives of people from all over the planet who survived the near-extinction of humanity.

Their fragmentary recollections, sewn together with Brooks' questions, notes, and asides, create the meta-narrative of creeping death and a world torn to pieces.

Though Brooks doesn't populate his post-apocalypse with such distinct and distinguished voices as Terkel's, he nevertheless captures a sense of everyman shell-shock and triumph, as well as the social reflections and shirt-sleeve philosophizing of a Terkel text. (In the only non-ironic acknowledgment, Brooks says Terkel and Romero "made this book possible.")

Ranging the surviving peoples and places of Free Earth, WWZ pieces together the story of the Zombie War, starting with its origins as a viral outbreak in China and how world authorities ignored the crisis that eventually erupted into a Great Panic, on through to the turning of the tide. From official suppression and repression, to the final draconian solution that left masses to slaughter, Brooks' personal narratives chronicle how old conflicts faded, new fault lines formed, superpowers shifted, and population centers resurfaced after the massacre of nearly us all.

Seeming to freeze our current geopolitical moment, Brooks throws zombies into the mix to envision an alternate universe where elements of globalization set up the catastrophe and likewise make possible humanity's survival. It's a fairly obvious message that we can only survive by overcoming ignorance and division, our narrow-minded militarism and self-interest: "Who knows what we could have accomplished if we had only checked the politics and come together as human bloody beings" (WWZ).

Like an Atlantic Monthly "What If" foreign-policy scenario pitting the U.S. against North Korea or China, WWZ alludes to very real international contexts and currents that would form the backdrop to a global cataclysm. And the WWZ web site features a nifty atlas where you can hear the subjects of the oral history in audio clips, from their “interviews." The site captures not only those imagined voices but also the sense of scientific and technical verisimilitude of a Michael Crichton novel, or better yet, the pseudo-realistic narrative-framing of Daniel Defoe's savage survival classics, Robinson Crusoe (1719) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722).

Overall, WWZ is a fun read that weaves the current shadows of international strife (epidemics, natural disasters, terrorism, warfare, eco-meltdown, nuclear proliferation) into a morality play of human will-to-live, much in the manner of grim novelist Cormac McCarthy's recent The Road. As an artifact of growing mainstream zombie culture, WWZ also pays off nicely with the shocking gore, destruction, and atrocity of a Romero movie, but writ large in globally conceived magnitude, envisioning entire megacities chewed to pieces in a helter skelter of viscera and hyper-violence.

I've written elsewhere about my zombie-obsession as childhood fascination with death, and then as the manifestation of childhood traumas, symbolized best by the vile movies I got to watch as a kid. Here, I'm reminded of George Romero's comment in an interview that his living-dead movies dramatize a new, revolutionary reality over-running a reactionary society, which is totally unprepared, outmoded, and doomed.

Every good zombie tale, thus, is not so much about an impossibly re-animated corpse coming to eat your brains, but about human savagery in the face of inevitable strife. As the creator of The Walking Dead comics puts it in Vol. 1 of that graphic epic, "Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society... and our society's station in the world. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff too... but there's always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness." (Find an online copy of WD Vol. 1 at the link above.)

WWZ feeds my enduring fascination with zombies — really, a creative obsession forged in childhood that in turn nourishes my imagination with primal, night-wailing imagery, to complement the hard features of reality with the idiosyncratic dressings of dreams.

And so, as I snooze to Dawn of the Dead's wailing ghouls wandering vacuous shopping-mall hell, the satire of brain-dead consumerism seems a fitting alternate-Christmas classic.
MERRY XMAS!

[...all zombie-art from The Walking Dead, an excellent comic-book series...]

POST SCRIPT
My sister says I'm "money"...
I couldn't claw out a zombie Xmas theme-song, so I just went with my current cerebral mood: self-indulgent, synthetic, noodlingly conceptual pulses of esoteric mind burps, thanks to MONEY MARK with "Maybe I'm Dead"...

December 23, 2006

Today's Theme Jam
SLEATER-KINNEY, "You're No Rock ’n' Roll Fun" (The Hot Rock 1999)

"...all the boys in the band
know how to get down
fill our Christmas socks
with whiskey drinks
and chocolate bars
and when the evening ends we won't
be thinking of you then
Even if your song
is playing on the jukebox"

The Hot Rocker

Digging up daily video picks has really given me a hankering for a live, loud, lusty rock show. For example, stumbling on The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion after a few years especially made me want to dig on some heavy primate rawk, like when I saw those guys at Lounge Ax and the outrageously calamitous grind made my friend Brian's nose bleed. (I especially remember getting pushed aside by Aryan Amazon-women with Swiss-Miss locks who bumped and gyrated lasciviously for the man of the hour.)

Jon's menacing pose somehow reminds of when my sister used to act like a werewolf by affecting an underbite and rolling her eyes.

Free associating, I came up with Sleater-Kinney and retrieved today's track. The lead singer reminds a lot of my SanAnto girlfriend, who back in 1999 repeated a variation on the song's chorus to me like a mantra. As a pretender to poetry "rock" stardom, I fit the bill but not the encore. No fun! Truly, I was no walk in the park.

"You wanna party with the lights on/ C'mon, I like it dark!"

But today, right now, I'd love to hear some good rock. Get stupid and go into groovy convulsions. You know: Fuck shit up.

"I GOT THE FLAVOR! I GOT THE FLAY-VUH! I GOTS DA FLAYYY-VUUUH!"—JSBX

Sleater-Kinney's stuff makes me remember that energy, in my 20s at shows and diving into a sea of thrift-store threads. Makes me wanna "hang out with the girl band!"

MAY YOUR CHRISTMAS SOCKS OVERFLOW WITH CHOCOLATES & WHISKEY!

December 22, 2006

Today's Theme
SONIC YOUTH, "Dirty Boots" (Goo 1990)

Immediately after graduation from college, I realized I had taken the whole thing way too seriously, especially upon meeting new friends who liked to stay up at all hours "conversating" and rocking the light fantastic.

That's when I stopped dressing like a campus dandy, in slacks and a blazer, and started in on the flannel and Doc Martens, rocking a ski cap. I wasn't quite comfortable with my hair, so I shaved down to the skin with my own clippers.

It was a good time, as I realized that I wasn't so bad at talking to girls and that maybe I didn't have to stay shy about the world. My soundtrack for "post-college rebel bullshit," Sonic Youth was one of the coolest bands to come out of century's end, and I really dug bassist Kim Gordon's stewing, gnarling power-stance and breathy spit-in-the-face vocals. (See her sardonic-ass cover of Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love" in the spin-off group Ciccone Youth, loosely inspired by Madonna and other '80s staples, on The Whitey Album c. 1986.)

Still, at rock shows I usually ended up just bashfully smiling at the hot rocker in the cool band T-shirt, not stage-diving with her into hipster eternity.

For more vintage Sonic Youth, see "Teenage Riot" from Daydream Nation, 1988.

December 21, 2006

Today's Theme Song
DEVO, "Girl U Want"

I Was a Teenage Spud Boy

The songs I'm posting these days say much more than I can squeeze out right now, and I didn't really plan on saying much here, but I was really happy to dig up this rocking ditty by Devo from their 1980 record Freedom of Choice.

This goes to show how much of a geek, dork, nerd, and four-eyed pencil-neck dweeb I am, among other things. My sister can attest to the fact that I got stupid on Devo back in high school. (I even made my own dorko Devo hat out of construction paper. HA HA! Go ahead, laugh, fucko! Laugh!)

So be it: This track rocks! Soundgarden covered it, but I think the original is tougher than that.

I mean, these guys were from Akron, Ohio, and they rocked. That gave me hope, coming from the middle of nowhere, Texas. It was great to be a teenager clued into Devo's cruelly ironic, off-kilter, "weird for the sake of being weird," space-boy garage RAWK-n-ROLL...or at least, such was my consolation for never having a girlfriend, to put it nicely.

So what! Songs like "Through Being Cool" gave me anti-anthems to throw at the "pinko normals," as my adolescent bogus-religion, the Church of the SubGenius, derisively called them. I didn't have to be one of the "in crowd" or even try to act like I fit in, because Devo, punk rock, and obscure lit were my inspiration through the pimply years, the perfect vehicle for scaring the hell out of the easily scared and confusing the simple of mind.

(The video nicely captures my own secret nerdy history of pretending to rock-stardom. Of course, I would have loved to rock the house to a crowd of adoring, slightly psychotic and/or sedated female fans! And yes, I had NO rhythm to speak of! To rock the shit like Devo was my dream...)

Tomorrow, I will pull out their very first album, an ode to a century run aground on inhuman de-evolution, retrogressive war-mongering, and backwards self-righteousness. (Still relevant, no?) I will crank "Uncontrollable Urge" beyond respectable levels. ("YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH!") And I will run off into the sunrise like a jumping-jack firework.

Try and stop me.

POST SCRIPT
"She Burp"
(...from a private journal...)

She burps, immaculately, out loud.

I don't think she notices, how every time it happens I stop and stare. Does she see how in awe I am of her?

It never occurred to me growing up to burp in front of my grandparents. Surely, I heard all manner of bodily sounds from Grandma, especially in the dead of night.

But to this day, I am so reserved about gas noise. Even now, I burp under my breath or into my mouth. Guarding of gastric privacy, I bite my stomach's tongue.

But not her. She burps without fear, without care. I want to laugh, I want to kiss her, I want to write poetry to her, but does she notice my tiny bit of adulation at such a passing fancy?

Her burping does indeed inspire a haiku or two that I hide like my broken wind:

try burping like so
but like a winter-iced tongue
I cannot match her

Her burps remind me of her love cries, when she digests not food but me.

This is her "shit-house" style, as she calls it. When it comes to mind, I think of those sweatpants she wears with "METAL UP YOUR ASS" lightning-bolted to the butt. I tell her that shit-house is hot, because it is.

But I don't tell her that her burps are hotter, icing on the shit-house cake.

To me, her gas, sass, and sweat-panted ass symbolize just about everything that made me bang my head like a Metallica fan for her, secretly digging her shit-house symphonies. To me, she is like a rock star in a sombrero, and she doesn't even know it. Or does she?

December 13, 2006

REBOZO LIBRE

Jack Black’s Nacho Libre just hit On Demand, and I gave the pig a chance after spitting up food and spewing yucks over my favorite Mexican stereotype: the exaggerated, clownishly baroque Spanish accent.

NACHO: “I went to a wrestling massshhh — lucha libre…”
SISTER ENCARNACIÓN: “¿¡You went to wassshhh a wrestleeeng massshhh?!”

Preposterous Spanish proclamations lick inexplicably English conversations that randomly break into anachronistic Americanisms.

NACHO: "EEET SOCKS TO BEEE MEEE!"

Shades of Speedy Gonzales, the Taco Bell Chihuahua, and that sleazy, oily, filthy Greaser who gets his teeth kicked out by Chuck Norris in Lone Wolf McQuade. In fact, Jack Black could be a white stand-in for that very Greaser.

And so, Nickelodeon's brownface hero in a kid flick makes for two culturally ridiculous propositions to get past, at least for the brown kid in me who nonetheless likes to watch Jack Black act idiotic.

First, a white guy playing a Mexican luchador: I was able to suspend disbelief here because I grew up watching bilingual Tex-Mex wrestling and not strictly lucha libre from across the border. Sometimes I'd flip channels quickly to watch Mil Mascaras morph into Rowdy Roddy Piper and then into Andre the Giant to El Santo, all on the same TV screen.

(Once, a friendly gringo asked me if it was called "lucha libre" because admission was free. Actually, the "libre" part means "freestyle," which explains why makeshift weapons sometimes get thrown into the "wrestling" ring. I prefer the "lucha libre" moniker to the more prosaic American "pro wrestling.")

But then I had to get past the ridiculous accents and tired stereotypes of Nacho Libre.

I'll be honest: After watching Jack Black in the preview gutturally utter, with sabor and Pavlovian savor, the two words "lucha libre," I had to clean the snot off my living-room table. After all, you watch any Jack Black movie mainly for the ubiquitous, ludicrous mugging. (See Nacho sing his operatic anthem-rock aria to Sister Encarnación like a Meatloaf burrito.)

Really, I've gotten used to the malleable Spanish accent and Latinoid identity somehow implied through the crafty linguistics of being vocally "down." For one thing, even Chicano movies like Mi Familia have always featured random English, without context or explanation, in conversations that should be Spanish. For another, the on-air accents of my favorite NPR Latinos convinced me a long time ago that you could make of your accent (and identity!) what you like, in Maria Hinojosa-like forcefully Hispanicized tones or Ray Suarez-sounding overly enunciated English. Brown it up, brown it down.

I'm reminded of all the times, like Richard Rodriguez, that I've heard "students on campus loudly talking in Spanish or thickening their surnames with rich baroque accents" (Hunger of Memory). This happened moreso at Stanford, where it was important to carry one's identity credentials at all times.

So, I don't think it's a stretch to allow a Beck ("Güero") or Jack Black a brown fancy or two. But why tap into Mexican clerical culture for gags? Why friars at an orphanage in the Spanish colonial-mission style? Won't that just suck the funny right outta the room?

In the movie, directed by Jared Hess of Napoleon Dynamite, Brother Ignacio ("Nacho") pursues his secret obsession of becoming a luchador while courting the lovely, dark-eyed Sister Encarnación, seducing her steadily with stretchy pants and delicious toast. While picking up day-old corn chips for the orphanage, Nacho meets the odd, skinny, dark-skinned, burro-faced Esquéleto ("Skeleton"), who becomes his wrestling partner and foil.

Where Nacho is a man of God, Esquéleto believes firmly in "science," which he pronounces with a broad, leering mouthful of equine teeth.

Nacho explains that his mother was a Lutheran missionary from Scandinavia (?) and his father a deacon from "México" (enunciated boldly): "They tried to convert each other, but they got married instead." When Nacho finds out that Encarnación considers wrestling ungodly, he goes underground and dons the mask to chase his dreams. Of course, in the end, he wins the big match and redeems his sport, riding off in unspoken betrothal with Encarnación.

In the end, the stereotypes don't hold up under the weight of Jack Black's stretchy pants. Yes, he busts out with a howler of a fresh interpretation of the worst Spanglish cliché:

"NO NO NO NO NO NO way JOSÉ!"

But the typical hokum gives way to broad cultural tableaux, in the style of Mexican retablos and physical comedy, with farcical results.

"LEEETLE KEEESSS!"
—Nacho to Encarnación

I recall a review that bagged the movie because, it said, the director seemed to think being Mexican is inherently funny.

But is it? Inherently funny, I mean. Or tragic? Or fated? Violent, spicy, sexy? Taco-Bell-Chihuahua-esque?

Yes, I remember the Frito Bandito and the Alamo. (Well, come on. At least we don’t have a leprechaun hawking cereal.)

But these are images with which Latinos even make play. I'm thinking here of the Sandra Cisneros poem, "You Bring out the Mexican in Me":

"The eagle and the serpent in me.
The mariachi trumpets of the blood in me.
The Aztec love of war in me. …
The switchblade in the boot in me.
The Acapulco cliff diver in me. …
The ¡Alarma! murderess in me."

Are these images and stereotypes, like two-sided tokens, better or worse than lost, dead ethnicity that collapses into stale multi-catch-all clichés in contrast to generic Anglo-American temperance: hot Irish temper, hot Italian temper, hot Polish temper, etc.? (Hot Scandinavian temper?)

(By the way, I like la Sandra's reference to ¡Alarma!, my favorite Mexican tabloid from childhood.)

In San Antonio, she of the purple rebozo draws admirers and wannabes and sycophants into a circle of comadres and clones, called the "Sandralistas." Like a friend at UTSA says, "They dress like the Dali Lama," in a mix of Asian and pre-Colombian flowing robes, when they read their precious fiction.

I propose rebozo libre. A new style of wearing ethnicity. Better than Tejano chic or rascuachismo.

My friend Marcy says we must go soon to Neo, a Chicago goth club, to get spooky and wear all black like when we listened to death rock and industrial music. This will be the perfect chance to dance al estilo rebozo libre! We will mix with the witches and vampires, the bleary-eyed dandies of the dark and Bettie Pages death-bunnies, the pierced and tattooed and eerie. ¡Viva Death! We will gyrate creepily with all the sexy calacas y gatas guapas.

Our soundtrack will be KINKY, as passersby see us and wonder, "¿a donde van los muertos?".

"te suplico hay que morirnos juntos
te lo ruego hay que morirnos juntos
que morir es nadar por el mundo
sin tener que salir a respirar..."

December 10, 2006

INSOMNIA & DEPRESSION Pt. 2
Accordion Cries, Tejano Tears, and Polka Tangents

Sandra Cisneros writes in her fiction about hearing papá sing along to música Mexicana while shaving in the morning, and how the resonance of rancheras belted out loud with shamelessly full-throated passion sounded like men crying. These tones of deepest world-weariness seemed contradictory coming from he who symbolized the three “F”s of Mexican manhood for the household: feo, fuerte y formal — plain, firm, and reserved.

I remember my grandfather as the avatar of los tres eFes. I only saw him cry once, and that was when I so upset my grandmother that her high-blood pressure flared up terribly and she had to go to the hospital. He told me in Spanish (what else?) that he could not live without her, and I felt like he had lifted the veil of unfailing strength to show me the raw, bleeding heart of human sacrifice. It was scary, what would turn out to be preparation for his death.

But grandpa had raised me, without really knowing it, on the weepy tang of unmanly tears, hinted at with the howling, screaming gritos that came from his radio every single day, contrapuntal primal howls emanating from his tinny transistor in the Ortiz Shoe Store, when a wheezing, pumping, never-ending accordion and plump, heart-plucked bass from a bajo sexto would draw me into the melancholy metaphysics of machismo.

el Grito. The scream of existential crisis, the outcry in the wilderness, the eruption of vocal vulnerability. The simultaneous yowl of birth, death, denial, and just about every trope of Chicano/Latino tragedy: “la chingada,” conquest, motherless-ness, betrayal, and all that melodramatic stuff that trills our “R”s with sexy fate and animates us with a quasi-mystical excuse for seasonal over-emotionalism. A veritable piñata of pain.

Grandpa’s vintage Coke machine filled my stomach with sugary mush, while his radio fed my heart with gritos and grown-up stuff.

EL éXITO DE LA SEMANA: Late Friday afternoons, showering in the concrete stall that was our bathroom behind grandpa’s shop, feeling steam against my face and drafts from cracks in the wall, with mournful eighth and sixteenth notes rolling through a polka interpreted by Mexican men who wanted me to join in and cry just a little, and then to fall asleep with the warm glow of gas-oven heaters against my hard-water-softened face, and grandpa’s radio somewhere in the next room softly murmuring baseball scores in Spanglish.

These experiences brought me into contradictory insights about the nature of existential pain and the power to overcome by embracing it. Nothing in my experience from those times symbolized the contradictions of life like the sound of an invulnerable man crying out loud in disgrace — what would normally be “sin vergüenza” transcended and pulled me into the fighting stance of a polka embrace.

Surely, one of the most vigorous and affecting gritos I ever heard as a kid came from Esteban “Steve” Jordan, also known as “el Parche” and “el Wizard,” or “The Jimi Hendrix of the Accordion.” Every shriek sounds a knot in my soul where hard times and sweet delights entwine.

And Steve Jordan was out there. He wore a patch from losing eyesight as an infant, his hair was a shock of wild pomp, and his playing could only be inspired by Faustian talents. When I met him in ’90s SanAnto, he seemed a mix of Charlie Parker (troubled but recovering) and John Coltrane (hard-bop genius who could take a pop standard and turn it inside out). Getting to see him for free weekly made me feel like the city was stealing from his musical gifts, as hardly anyone showed up for the performance pyrotechnics.

Using odd echo effects and delicate phrasing of every wickedly ripping note, Jordan still plays in SanAnto weekly, which makes me want to rip out of Chicago this coming week so I can jaw with this musical hero next weekend and maybe share his memories of Bay Area Latin rhythms and acid rock that animate his music as much as waltzes and corridos.

For now, the over-affected, moody, feeling-sorry-for-oneself voice of Tex-Mex conjunto gusto reminds me of commonplaces from my border upbringing, a place of in-between-ness and becoming for my identity, psyche, heart, and soul. And the music keeps me company, with advice and lore from so many machos ready to bear it all, like the tequila-soaked tears of a clown, over heartache:

“ahora que me hallo solo y triste y abandonado
solo tomando calmaré my padecer
¿de que le sirve para el hombre ser honrado
y darle todo el corazón a una mujer?
y cuando acuerda su cariño le han robado
y lo an dejado con su pena padecer…
¡entre mas tomo mas me acuerdo de tu amor!”
“Por tu cariño”

Funny, how all of that can get summed up in one highly stylized yelp. My grandmother’s unaffected response to this sort of showy, manly sorrow? Simply: “Life is suffering.” But more on that later.

Listen to Jordan’s music yourself at the highlighted link.

(You can hear several songs by Jordan here, but it will start off with “La Llorona Loca,” loosely translated as “The Crazy, Crying Woman.)

December 8, 2006

Next week, my Harold Washington College colleague Marcy Rae Henry celebrates the release of her collection, The CTA Chronicles. (See the link for full details.)

Professor of Humanities and ranchera-dabbling musician, Marcy will read from this interwoven mix of observations, conversations, character sketches, and passing fancies.

Soaking up some advance pieces from the forthcoming book, I'm reminded of countless sojourns on the city's rapid-transit odyssey known as the CTA. Marcy's eye for sensual detail is matched by her ear for the unforgettable voices that surface within the wash of noise and humanity in mass transit.

I'm especially intrigued to see her forthcoming novel, Cumbia Therapy, which might be exactly the kind of rhythmic counseling I need these days. Congrats also to Marcy for getting tenure at the H-Dub, as we started on the T-track at the same time, and I'm definitely inspired now to get my own writing together. And maybe even pick up a three-row button accordion, too!

December 7, 2006

INSOMNIA & DEPRESSION
Part One: Mystical Musings and Poetic Therapy

Eyeglasses crusted over with dried salt and cheeks chapped from crying, I turn to Rumi for comfort, for mystical salve in times when God plays the majestic music of sadness and despair through my mouth and draws agonies out from deep within my heart:

“God picks up the reed-flute world and blows,
Each note is a need coming through one of us,
a passion, a longing-pain.
Remember the lips
Where the wind-breath originated,
And let your note be clear.
Don’t try to end it.
Be your note.
I’ll show you how it’s enough.”

If this is true, then God surely has played entire symphonies of desolation through me, singing busted tones of weepy, off-tune notes through these lips. God has spoken with my mouth, and Rumi tells me that this is more than enough — this pathetic crying, this sore weakness, this absolute surrender to my abject emotions, this speculative throwing of my heart into deep waters to see if it sinks or floats, to see if there is hope for surviving this flood of emotions, this well of tears.

Rumi tells me that this is more than enough to show that God is with me and that I am in touch with a divine reality. He thinks I should embrace this pain and find in it my victory:

“Here are the miracle-signs you want: that
you cry through the night and get up at dawn, asking,
that in the absence of what you ask for your day gets dark,
your neck thin as a spindle, that what you give away
is all you own, that you sacrifice belongings,
sleep, health, your head…
When acts of helplessness become habitual,
Those are the signs.”
—“Acts of Helplessness”

I turned to this exact poem at the turn of the century, when I was stuck jobless and essentially down-and-out in San Antonio. I had stayed up all night, unable to sleep; it was a particularly hard time for very objective, concrete reasons, heartbreak and financial brokenness included. And so I picked up the book that one of my poetry friends from the SanAnto puro ¡SLAM! days pressed into my hands, urging me to read it, as the book had messages specifically for me to embrace. Or so he urged.

In the morning, I asked God to help me. It was a relatively simple prayer. And then I turned to Rumi.

And what of his lessons? Turning to this one poem in particular, I felt the hair on my neck rise, as if Rumi himself had reached out from medieval Persia to find me, his eager student and mystical friend, to show me the “signs” I so badly needed to see: “Water washes over a beached fish, the water/ of those signs I just mentioned.”

From that point on, I could not put the book down, and I ripped through it looking for more signs from God and Rumi to set me on a better path. And what did he tell me? “Cry Out in Your Weakness”:

“Crying out loud and weeping are great resources.
A nursing mother, all she does
is wait to hear her child.

Just a little beginning-whimper,
and she’s there.

God created the child, that is, your wanting,
so that it might cry out, so that milk might come.”

An apt metaphor, as in my life I've cried out for milk that hasn’t been there, for a mother who disappeared when I was a baby, and for comfort that was denied, missing, gone.

I still cry out. And if Rumi’s right, Creation’s wondrous music has poured gouts of bittersweet, broken melodies through me like the sniffling of tears and snot that choke my throat and sting my eyes.

I do believe this, just as surely as I believe that God sent Oliver Carey Grimball to Texas with his worn copy of Rumi to show me the signs I have badly needed to tap into in this life. This was the beginning of a spiritual turn that has helped me cope with certain realities that I have lived with nearly all of my life.

Namely: I suffer from clinical depression and insomnia. And I claim them as much a part of me as my “severe features” and dark skin, as Richard Rodriguez might say.

Of course, I’ve had to marshal every resource, call in every favor, take every opportunity available, and carve out every space possible to meet the challenges of my mental maladies. This has included therapy, medication, and recently, my regimen of exercise and my conscious decision to eradicate the last, lingering effects of depression in my life.

But I’m glad for now that Rumi tells me it’s ok to dig deep and really feel this pain as a mystical gift: “Cry out! Don’t be stolid and silent/ with your pain. Lament! And let the milk/ of loving flow into you.// The hard rain and wind/ are ways the cloud has/ to take care of us.” I take this as the most sage advice in this frigid time of hard memories and foreboding cold. Harsh winds and painfully biting frost, too, have ways to take care of us.

This all reaches back to high school, to the time I first fell in love and lost my dearest friend to the cruel fates of despair, and to when I started inhabiting a shadow world of lampshades and slowly ticking clocks in the dead of night.

I will write about all of this soon enough, to tell the full story of who I am, to claim my soul, spots and all, and hold it up to the light of day, and to be able to say at the end of it all that I triumphed over the darkness, that I cried out in pain and was answered by the echo of my own voice, a sign from God and a spiritual direction to help me along the path to reckoning with depression as my lot in life, one that I can embrace and even dance with in bleak arabesques of sorrow, hope, and maybe victory some day.

Bismillah.

For now, I embrace the gamble of life itself, to dig into one’s own soul and become oceanic when tasting the delicacies of breath, love, and drunken joy — God’s means of inebriation as powerful as the best wine and the sweetest hashish, as Rumi says.

For now, I taste these tears, gulp them down, and thank God for these signs. And I heed Rumi’s call to keep loving fiercely, to keep crying out loud, and to give my all to what gifts and dreams may come.

“Gamble everything for love,
if you’re a true human being.

If not, leave
this gathering.

Half-heartedness doesn’t reach
into majesty. You set out
to find God, but then you keep
stopping for long periods
at mean-spirited roadhouses.”

I will not leave the gathering. I will not be ashamed of my tears. I will taste in them the signs of grace. I will claim my weakness as the source of my greatest strengths, and I will not be made to feel less of a person for it.

This insomnia, this depression is me, and if no one else can appreciate it, I will be its most faithful lover.

But for now, allow me to have a few drinks in this not-so-mean-spirited roadhouse of my soul, before I tell the story of how I discovered my depression and started to meander in this garden of delights and despair.

"Every night and every morn
some to misery are born
every morn and every night
some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight
some are born to endless night."
—William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”

December 6, 2006

DON’T JOG IN THE YELLOW SNOW

I called in sick today out of psychic exhaustion from a smorgasbord of wonderful sources, mainly the fact that I’ve woken up this past week at 4 am just about every night, unable to go back to sleep.

But I’m fighting back. I scraped my carcass together this afternoon and forced myself to jog, as the stark cold, ice, and darkness have kept me from venturing out.

PREP: Stretching, push-ups, and flows from Lady Sovereign, A Tribe Called Quest, Nas, Los Hermanos Químicos, and a super-reggaetón mix from my boy Dave the Wave.

Plus, “Enter the Wu Tang: 36 Chambers”: “Bring da’ muthafuckin’ ruckus!” Now: Pumped up and ready to go. LET’S DO THIS THING.

"Here comes the Tiger versus Crane!"
—Old Dirty Bastard

Such were my illusions.

Dodging frost packs and slippery sheets, I hobble my way down the street from the back alley, weaving through garbage bags and snow ridges. At the park, the only other animals out and about are a pack of dogs that look on me with seeming pity, and for the first five minutes of wind-up, I keep wondering, “WHAT THE ‘F’ AM I DOING OUT HERE,” as wisps of fried-onion-and-philly-cheese-steak from the corner bodega molest my nasal passages, prompting trans-fatty phlegm to drip down my face, reminding me of my Elmer’s-glue entrees from elementary school, and sweaty gusts of frigid wind blast me every few minutes like the caresses of an amorous, drunken polar bear.

It truly sucked. And I felt like a chump. But I kept at it.

Ten minutes out, I congratulate myself and consider calling it a day, like junior-high athletics back in wintry Texas when I would look forward to a reserve of hot water for my morning post-workout shower.

But I kept going.

15 minutes out, and the dogs start taking all-you-can-dump bathroom breaks within my field of vision, like they’re mocking me or something.

20 minutes out, and I figure, why not another 10? My bright idea fulfilled, I drag my corpse across the statuary landscapes of icicles and frost puddles, yellow snow peaks and breath-condensation swirling into misty figurines emblematic of my hopes and dreams.

It feels like an accomplishment worthy of a small yet shiny trophy, and I pump my fists in the air like Rocky (in the movie where he lost). The dogs look away with disinterest. The philly-cheese phantasms subside. My breath comes in sweet gulps that smooth the burning in my lungs and beating of my chest.

“Yes I will,
Yes I will
Make it over the mountain,
Yes I will,
Make it over that hill.”
—El Gilberto Sextet

December 4, 2006

SUMFIN RANDOM

“Everybody get random/ All gyal dem, all man dem/ ...Jus' do sumfin random.”
—Lady Sovereign, “Random”

RANDOM "ASININE" THOUGHTS

“Get the fuck up outta’ my ear
’cuz I ain’t buyin’ shit this year…"
—Juju, “Préndelo,” The Beatnuts

Yes, that's right. Juju said it, and I repeat: I am not purchasing "shit" this year.

Whatever you got for sale, I don’t want it. Whatever bill of goods, ship it elsewhere. Whichever bridge to lease, go ask the next guy. I'm not interested. "Do you think I am innarrested? I am not innarrested one bit!" (William S. Burroughs).

POSTED: NO SOLICITORS.
BEWARE OF DOG.
NO DOGS ALLOWED.
CAKE IN THE DISPLAY CASE IS NOT FOR SALE.

Do not ask for the dessert menu: I’m not reaching for the check at the end of dinner. I’m not calling when I haven’t heard back. I’m not making the reservation, not confirming with voice mail, not responding to your wack-ass text-message. Re-can thy spam. I'll have none of that.

Whether you claim to love me one month or loathe me the next, adore me one week and evaporate six ways to the weekend, act your age or your shoe size, it's all the same, me vale, es ist mir egal...

"I'm English, try and deport me!"
—"Love Me or Hate Me," Lady Sovereign

I am no longer running your marathons. (I run my own track, through the snow, baby!) I am no longer jumping through your hoops. (This year: Nothing but hoops on TV!) In fact, I am no longer the one in pursuit. (High-speed chases kill many innocent bystanders every year.) Because I deserve a whole lot better than that. Yes, I do. Yes, I will. This is the year.

“Wake up and smell the Bustelo/ and say hello/ to this fly fellow/ word to my abuelo...”
—"Préndelo"

Instead of listening to your nonsense, here’s how I propose to spend my time:
...practice my SPANISH & GERMAN, to order you a plate of vergüenza-freude.
...learn KARATE, to kick your ass right out of my field of vision.
...pick up an INSTRUMENT, to play my own theme song.
...PRAY daily, for you know not what you do.

Seriously. Make way for the S-O-V.

“If you love me then, thank you/ if you hate me then, fuck you.”
—Lady Sovereign

These snotty thoughts popped up over drums and bass while I was stuck in office hours today with my good friend Google Video. And though I most sincerely will not be buying snot this year, the very next record I pick up will be the freshest tracks available from Lady Sovereign.

She's five-foot-one-inch tall and something like 19 years old, so her playfully childish nonsense-rhymes tap a fountain of youth from which the Beastie Boys, Beck, and Cibo Matto once supped, except this Londoner MC seems more like a cartoonishly cute derivative of Eminem, Ali G, and Andy Milonakis. Gleefully absurdist lyrics especially remind of Milonakis rockin' pancakes upon da' face, but with Def Jam-produced Ritalin loops, Tetris-themed techno scale-progressions, and quirky air-raid alarums over drum-and-bass over-lode.

The over-stated attitude of dressed-down, diminuitive braggadocio plays with sweet irony as foil against the machismo of hip-hop's over-sexed bling purveyors: "J-Lo's got a batty,/ Well you can't see mine cuz I wear my trousers baggy” ("Random").

(See Lady S-O-V spit on a crowd of knock-off-designer-purse peddlers in the "Love Me or Hate Me" video.)

Kicking Fergie's ass back to the gym for good, Lady Sovereign mocks all "high-maintenance chicks" and geezers with sing-songy self-proclamation:

“So I can't dance and I really can't sing.
I can only do one thing,
And that's be Lady Sovereign!”

Like the lady says: I can really only do one thing.

"It's off the cadena..."—Beatnuts

November 27, 2006

30 MINUTES OF NON-STOP JOGGING

This is my milestone: To measure life in moments rather than years, to live each and every single minute alive and awake, with wide-eyed relish, and to savor my heartbeats as delicious passages ticking off with percussive vigor from my very blood’s rhythm, tapping out a master-plan.

The first five minutes are pro-forma: Every single jog begins this way, with solitude and pain. I’m by myself and I hurt. And is this fundamentally different from any other moment, when I’m not jogging, that is?

The next five minutes: The Beckett refrain becomes a mantra — “I can’t go on… I’ll go on…”

The middle 10: Like that pre-pubescent and then adolescent sliver of life, time compresses and seems like this is all there is. I see no past and no future. I want to be impulsive and quit, but part of me thinks I can go on forever, while euphoria mixes with nihilism, as I waver from one moment to the next, poised to seize the day or just crawl back into my shell.

The next five or so: I keep looking at my watch. How much more time do I have? Spit takes on the consistency of glue. Out of the corner of my eye, I keep seeing dogs in the park taking a dump. The brain wanders in alliterative delirium: canines, condos, caffeine, coño… Every single Newport in the vicinity wafts my way, as I choke on my own esophagus.

The last five: I’m not really on the last five — I just keep looking at my watch again, hoping that time will pass and free me from the agony and shortness of breath, but such is my illusion, to escape the challenge at hand, but to flee into what, and why? Wasn’t this very moment all that there really is?

The last five, for real: A lamp-bulb flickers in pathetic protest against the dying of the light, as I round the park field-house yet again, and Michael Jordan is still in mid-360, still believing he can fly, in a framed BULLS poster that becomes my signpost of progress, someone to look up to, as I cycle through in eternal recurrence, past teenagers toking up, past people returning home from work with lone mom-and-pop items in sorrowfully ragged plastic bags to complete the workday and turn on the kitchen light and deal with what lies before, what comes next, and what comes after that, and I soak it all up just a bit too fast for my own good…

I wake up a few minutes later after having passed out in the park. A dog is licking my face. No, it’s actually a homeless guy trying to give me CPR. And trying to roll me.

As Rumi might say, this is my means of praise: To count each one of these 30 minutes every single time, but in more and more close detail, to account for them with the force of life and blood, and to live every last infinitely sub-dividable piece as if I have so many more to come and must buck up to savor what’s in store, for now and forever.

November 23, 2006

The THANKSGIVING BURRITO

Right now, my neighbors from Belize are cooking something on the back porch that smells so much more spicy and delicate than turkey, their Soca beats and breaks bleeding through the floorboards like elaborately simmered aromas. Greeks and cops at A&T Grill across the street dig into holiday omelets, potato pancakes, irresistible sausage ’n’ egg combos. I plan my own special festivus-flavored tradition of the Great Thanksgiving Burrito.

Many thanks to the fates for delivering Mexicans in particular unto the shores and kitchens of this land of plenty, so that they could in turn pepper expatriates and taco-dinners across the City in a Garden to make me feel a part of life’s grandest of dispensations.

Still thankful in some other time and place, my grandmother prepares frozen-processed biscuits and canned jellied hams, as my sister and I sit sprawled and goggle-eyed with Macy’s-parade floats; rose-bowl-colored cranberries and fiesta confetti; pumpkins, poinsettias, and Plymouth Rock; cornucopias spewing the contentment of all tomorrow’s tamales.

Many thanks to the tidal whims and spinning fortune-wheels of blind, dumb luck for granting me the chance and realization of a job-for-life teaching, reading, writing, thinking, and sharing with some of the greatest students in this will-o’-the-wisp Windy City.

I share a sense of displacement, memories of a world lost and family left behind, a timeworn homeland that exists in my mind like Narnia or Oz, and the American hopes and dreams embodied in my grandmother’s Thanksgivings, communicated in the words without true translation by which she named our holiday: el día de dar gracias…

Thanks for who I am, delivered whole with half-and-half hybrid cultures of Texas, Spanglish as my grand-mother tongue, off-color-pastel taste of home-spun worth, Carmen-Lomas-Garza hue and deep-brown shade, knit into a fabric of pure providence to find myself a product of trans-border experience and blood, the off-colorings of duty-free bootleg cultura from this side as much as that, both familiar and familial, welcome to me in my most private mental drawing rooms off elongated hallways of reminiscence.

I revel in the promises, the hopes of the Thanksgiving Burrito. I sing its praises and flaunt its flour in the face of adversity. I lift hands to the heavens in thanks for this wondrous symbol of adaptation and multi-culinary/cultural transubstantiation. I whisper in eerie, hushed Latin at its mysteries.

Many thanks spread from the foothills of Palo Alto to the Loyola lakeshore for my education and its fanciful excesses, its realization of dreams — the delicacies of Dostoevsky and Derrida as rare treats denied those before me, the thrilling solitude of reciting Byron out loud and traveling “in the realms of gold … many goodly states and kingdoms seen” upon first reading Keats, now “silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

And to return home, if for a meal, with the Great Thanksgiving Burrito.

Many and more thanks for family, faith, and breath.

November 14, 2006

KARMA'S BITCH

"You know the kind of guy who does nothing but bad things and then wonders why his life sucks?...I'm exactly who you think I am."
—My Name Is Earl

Earl J. Hickey pretty much could be one of my cousins. But a white or lighter-skinned cousin, of course. (Like Felipe from Kansas, he of the golden surfer-locks!) But a cousin who would have to leave the perilous pathway of vice behind. (No more grand larceny or trafficking of any kind.) And instead of an evangelical awakening by way of getting Born Again in the Name of the Lord, primo would follow the mysterious ways of abstract Eastern philosophies spelled out at the bottom of a longneck beer or prophesied in the ashes of menthol-flavored hang-overs, on a Karmic quest described alternately as a "Crusade," a "Mission," or "that Robin-Hood-Batman-Jesus stuff," an epic tour of duty through the Casa de Pizza & Games o' life, an honest-to-goodness stab at righting all the wrongs and making good on all the mistakes and bad choices.

"How should I have my chicken? Grilled or McNuggetted?"
—Randy, Episode 8, "Joy's Wedding"

Now in its second season, My Name Is Earl is an odd piece of shit-kicker chic for the network that once treated us all to the Cosby kids; a downward dip into trailer-trash tropes, like Tall Boys at 10 in the morning and useless-loser lotto stubs; a picaresque bender across landscapes of ugly Americana, convenience-store parking lots, abandoned car-washeterias, and rickety dive-bars that serve un-licensed ingredients in the crab stew, to the tune of karaoke beatboxing and banjos.

Our eponymous hero, played by Jason Lee, experiences spiritual enlightenment after winning $100,000 in scratch-lotto and then immediately going to ER, victim of a hilarious hit-and-run. Losing his winning ticket and his wife Joy (Jaime Pressly), Earl sits in the hospital moping, whereupon he sees Carson Daly on TV explain his personal philosophy of karma: do good things and good things will happen to you, do bad things and bad things will happen to you.

On the mend, Earl writes a list of more than 200 bad things he's done in life, and he sets out to right every single wrong. His dim-witted, slack-jawed brother Randy (Ethan Suplee) at first protests, pointing out their last dollar spent on a ratty '70s-deco motel room. But when Karma seemingly hands the $100,000 lotto ticket back to Earl on a random breeze, the brothers and their new friend Catalina (Nadine Velazquez), the motel maid (who illegally came to America in a box), decide that the path of Karma is the "roadmap to a better life."

And so, every episode, like Fantasy Island at a rodeo stockyard, Earl tries to mark items off his list by making up in some way for his past misdeeds, such as #58 ("fixed a high school football game"), #84 ("faked my own death to break up with a girl"), #27 ("made fun of people with accents"), #112 ("let someone serve jail time for a crime I committed"), #139 ("stole beer from a golfer"), etc., etc., etc. Blazing ethical trails through a southwestern skyline and low-brow locales, Earl sums up the show, with every intro, as his life-quest of self-definition: "one by one I'm going to make up for all my mistakes...I'm just trying to be a better person...My name is Earl..."

Through it all, Earl develops a moral sensibility in his bootleg version of Karma, which is after all "something Carson Daly came up with." He experiences moral states (such as guilt) and ethical conundrums (such as settling conflicting interests and tracing the negative impacts of his choices). And in Episode 16 of Season One, when Earl tries to dodge a prior duty on his list in order to spend time with a love interest, he realizes that he cannot shirk his obligations to Karma. You can't run from Karma because, as Earl puts it, Karma "knows where your mama parks your house." The tougher items on his list only draw him deeper into commitment to the logic of Karma, further testing his will to remain on the path of integrity.

Earl is, in the final analysis, "Karma's Bitch."

In the recently released Season One DVD collection, creator Greg Garcia talks about the origins of Earl in terms of his own upbringing in a trailer park, with a mixed-race family and a ne'er-do-well father who decided one day to do the right thing. The earnest subtext of telling stories inspired by his dad comes across in the sometimes melodramatically cute and always farcical resolutions to Earl's ethical dilemmas. And in a DVD extra entitled "Bad Karma," an alternate-universe Earl gets inspired by Family Guy's Stewie Griffin (rather than Daly) and decides to exact vengeance on anyone who ever did him wrong — in this dystopic vision, Earl gets cut to the quick by the ubiquitous influence of Karma, suggesting the moral backbone to every absurd episode.

Creator Garcia seems an earnest sort himself, as he chats on a DVD extra (shot from the passenger seat of his muscle car): On the importance of being Earl, Garcia waxes sincere, confessing also that the first time he met Earl-actor Jason Lee he was drunk and hopped up on crystal meth.

The DVD extras cover such gems and more, like the story of Lee and Garcia going to bat with the network over Lee's ridiculous moustache. With multiple flashbacks, quickly moving cuts and edits, no laugh track, and a mini-cinematic style, Earl has managed to chip away at more of my post-tenure time with a nice TV lineup on Thursdays crested by The Office.

And Earl does, after all, remind me of certain cousins, the biker bandidos and franchise narcos, the juvie veteranos and lowriders who introduced me to kung-fu movies and the true meaning of the "wife-beater" tank-top.

I'm reminded of my cousins Rick DeRoulet, recently passed, and Rolando Garcia, no longer with us. I think about my time with them and the rest of my cousins as a teenager in Wichita, Kansas, memories flavored by B-grade intoxication, blurred and slurred moments of aimless cruising with a cuz or two.

Where would they be now, had they chosen the mantle of Karma? Would they still have their lives, their livers?

"You know in them old cartoons when people would get so hungry and confused that they'd think other people was food?...You're a taquito with a moustache!..."
—Randy to Earl, Final Episode, Season One

Gritty details — like microwaveable cheeseburgers from a vending machine, liquid-paper huffing, and neon Lone Star Beer signs missing a few letters — bring me back to my own felt sense of AmeriKarma. "No more generic sweetie bits for you, brother...You're riding the Karma train, now!"

September 21, 2006

"WHY DO THE RECORD PLAY THAT WAY?"
—"Cold Lampin' With Flavor"

4 RECORDS

Recovering from the Maine Federation of Firefighters debauch over the weekend, I made my way to Evanston this Monday for a tasty throat swab, bloodletting, and antibiotic dose of horse pills. My treat: Vinyl bingo at Dr. Wax, where I found four pieces from my youth.

First, SHOUT AT THE DEVIL (1983), by Mötley Crüe.

This one took me back to junior high, when hard rock was said to induce suicides and pot smoking, in addition to hardcore Satanism, witchcraft, and ritual infant sacrifice. I remember the TV tabloids claiming that Judas Priest and Ozzie were the pied pipers of Mephistopheles, luring vulnerable youth to eternity in Hades. Styx led to the River Styx, while Ronnie James Dio's "Holy Diver" dunked mullet-headed teenagers in the Lake of Fire. What can I say? "10 Seconds to Love" and "Looks That Kill" definitely kick dick to this day, and I must perform the devil salute like Nikki Sixx on a DUI, reminding me of those Tex-Mex shitkickin' rockers slurring "Led Zepplin, ese!" over rancid beer shotguns at the heavy-metal vomit party.

Next, THE ESSENTIAL CHARLIE PARKER (c. 1949) on Verve.

Yardbird does a number on my soul when I imagine him flying on heroin with renditions of "Bloomdido" and "Chi Chi" that have the power to induce ADHD for real in Generation Ritalin, if only they were actually to put this one on the iPod brain and trace the 8ths and 16ths wending and multiplying in and out of beautiful melodic lines. This stuff is what got me into jazz in the first place.

Third comes WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1963), also on Verve.

The Incomparable, Unbelievable, Uncanny, and Irrepressible JIMMY SMITH and His Hammond B3 Organ knock the socks off squares in "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue," with arrangements by Oliver Nelson and a taste of how the Wolf would win in Jimmy's version of PETER AND THE WOLF. I vibed on this one with the blind organist at the Green Mill's happy hour one Friday, and he threw down on "Any Number Can Win" and "The Sermon."

Finally, a corrective to "The Flavor of Love": IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS TO HOLD US BACK (1988), the follow up to YO! BUM RUSH THE SHOW, by Public Enemy.

Produced by Rick Rubin of PAUL'S BOUTIQUE and LICENSED TO ILL fame on the DEF JAM label, MILLIONS truly is a soundtrack for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as critic Greg Tate once said. Armageddon has been in effect, so go get a late pass!

"Here it is: BAM! and you say GODDAMN, this is the dope jam!"

Titles boom right off the spinning slice like "LOUDER THAN A BOMB" and "NIGHT OF THE LIVING BASEHEADS." Chuck D, "The Hard Rhymer," never rapped for the sake of riddling, and when I discovered this piece back in college I was thrilled to hear the long, punchy mouthfuls from Chuck and Flavor Flav spitting about a whole lot more than "MY ADIDAS."

"Posing a threat, you bet it's fucking up the government!"

It's strange to me now that they've drifted into obscurity, their neutron beats taking a back seat as the curious footnote to Flav's reality-TV career. But Flavor was always the Mad Jester, ready to bug you out with his Cold Lampin' freak-moves that were part Coltrane and part Night Train.

"BRING THAT BEAT BACK!"

When my sister first visited Chicago, we went to the Aragon circa 1990 to observe the eve of the Gulf War with a duet between SONIC YOUTH and PUBLIC ENEMY that juiced the mixed crowd of white boho hipsters and b-boys slammin' guitar feedback and overdubbed breakbeats, inspiring a riot that drew eight wagons and many plainclothes coppers kicking ass on the longhairs.

"Rock the hard jams/ treat it like a seminar/ reach the bourgeois/ and rock the boulevard!"—"DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE"

This one should be required rhyming, lest we forget that Chuck and Flav once counseled to "FIGHT THE POWER" and "PARTY FOR YOUR RIGHT TO FIGHT!"

August 24, 2006

JOGGING IN DARK WATERS

I've been jogging since early June, I don't remember when, exactly, and today I did 30 solid minutes — 20 non-stop from Paulina/Greenleaf to Ridge/Dempster in Evanston, and then 10 more on the way back. The mind plays tricks on lungs and muscles every single time, but the mind can be defeated. I've a few lessons, at least, to learn from all this.

All the way through, I prayed for rain, to get drenched in the city's condensed sky-sewage and so taste the effluent of millions of dreams.

Tonight, I finish Koji Suzuki's stories collected in Dark Water (Vertical, 2004). Like much J-horror showing up on the big screen, it's the stuff of stock ghost stories, but driven by relentless, mercilessly demented love-gone-vengeful, congealing into phantasms of the four elements and dripping with the blood of purgatorial remorse.

I'm not yet ready to become a character of my own narratives again, to put on the raiments of professorial certitude. If it rains tonight, I'll run out and slosh around yet in my own dark waters, to wipe the salt from my stinging eyes and clear the creases of my outlook.

August 23, 2006

IMAGINE THE MONSTERS OF ROCK

This past Saturday, I planned readings for my dying Latino Lit class and plied my living-room table with books and note-scraps like votives for altares and antepasados.

I thumbed through a book I had not read in years, by East Coast Puerto Rican poet Martín Espada: Imagine the Angels of Bread (WW Norton & Co., 1996). It had been sitting at the Borders in Uptown, overlooking skid row on the mend, an echo of Espada's urban landscapes of coughing radiators and rusted cast-off dragons. On the bus home, even titles of these poems prodded fits I could barely contain, laughter and tears and heartache, titles such as his poem for Central American activist Demetria Martínez: "Sing in the Voice of a God Even Atheists Can Hear." And titles absurd ("Do Not Put Dead Monkeys in the Freezer"), fierce ("Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Food Stamps"), and transcendent ("Hands Without Irons Become Drangonflies").

I read the title poem out loud in lit this past summer, trying to keep my voice from trembling: "this is the year/ that shawled refugees deport judges/ who stare at the floor/ and their swollen feet/ ... This is the year that those who swim the border's undertow/ and shiver in boxcars/ are greeted with trumpets and drums/ at the first railroad crossing/ on the other side."

And so, on Saturday morn, I read these pieces out loud at my table, in between records I had been spinning in a nostalgic fit of hard-rock mayhem, with Van Halen and AC/DC weaving a strange kinaesthesia of rhythms on the brain through Espada's cadences and images. I wondered how to translate my own sense of hybrid ethnic Americanism into an exciting class, with Love & Rockets comic books and lines like "I went/ to the suburban school,/ embroidered guayabera/ short sleeved shirt/ over a turtleneck,/ and said, Look kids,/ cultural adaptation" ("My Native Costume" Espada).

I wanted to show off "My Native Costume" of ironic post-ideological Chicanismo and hybrid pochismo by way of Tex(t)-Mex, stuff they once called nuevo wavo or plain-old rascuache. You know: ROCK! But my class was cancelled today. Only three students had signed up.

Just about the only response to the class was an inquiry this summer from someone at the college who grilled me about my cultural credentials. I tried to keep the conversation from devolving into an argument, but the woman from South America wanted me to speak perfect Spanish and talk about magical realism. Like Richard Rodriguez quips in his "Brown Study," "Trust me, there has been little magical realism in my life since my first trip to Disneyland." (Actually, I've only been to Disneyworld.)

I wanted to share with students quotes like the following from Ed Morales, and talk about Spanish-v.-English: "isn't this just an arcane exercise in preserving European flourishes in an American hemisphere that is moving quickly into the future? The fetishizing of pure Spanish only serves a colonial mindset, preventing Latinos from participating in the more dynamic, adaptable world of English. Spanglish is Spanish adapting the crazy rhythms of English, and English inheriting the multicultural content of Latin America" (Living in Spanglish).

I wanted to talk about hemispheric convergence and the full meaning of "America" as the joyously flawed yet vibrant and participatory place in which we find ourselves now, savoring the rich "loco slam," as a slightly tipsy black woman once put it at the AM Factory soul-hut — you know, the funk parlor that used to sit behind Ronnie's Steak Palace downtown...?

I wanted to relish and delight in the transnational Americanism of poets like Espada, who can juggle beautiful allusions to Pablo Neruda with U.S. pop references:

The only

aliens

we like

are the ones

on Star Trek,

'cause

they all

speak

English

—"Governor Wilson of California Talks in His Sleep"

Though I looked forward to celebrating such notions with my lit students, I felt nervous at the challenge, the chance to guide discussions that might have been squelched at a Stanford activist meeting, shouted down with nationalist repetition, or neglected for lack of recognition and relevance to the political exigencies of the immigration debate. Espada's revenge poem about "The Foreman's Wallet" tells what I wanted to do with nationalism and politics: "we shrink-wrapped the foreman's wallet,/ gleaming in the fresh plastic/ like a pound of hamburger."

So I'll put away the essays by Rubén Martínez and that "all-girl road novel thing" by Erika López, the short stories by "la Sandra" and anthologies of so many Chicanos and Boricuas, even the monologues of Freddie Prinze and John Leguizamo, the lyrics of Presley impersonator El Vez. I'll keep reading Espada. And I'll wait for my next chance to turn some lit up to "ELEVEN" and talk about the relevance of Led Zepplin to Mexican-American poetics. ¡ESE!

"IS YA'LL READY FOR SOME POETRY, MUTHAF****S?!"
—Mos Def

August 21, 2006

“Hello walls,
How’d things go for you today?
Don’t you miss her,
Since she up and walked away?”

Count These as Good Times…

There once was a breakup so bad that part of me still waits for the headlights of a Ford Ranger to throw shadows across the bare walls of a San Antonio apartment so many years ago, time thrown down a well I could’ve found myself stuck in for good.

Part of me waits yet, warmed by feeble embers of heartbreak, for certain someones to save me from walls collapsing and windows tunneling into poignant specks of yesterday.

“And I’ll bet you dread to spend
Another lonely night with me,
But lonely walls, I’ll keep you company…”

At times like this, the walls even tire of my company. This is when I imagine myself in a “brown funk” like Richard Rodriguez: “I am alone in my brown study. I can say anything I like. Nobody listens” (Brown).

And my only consolation, then, seems the few pieces of vinyl that help me see a Texas sunset, a crushed and emptied can of Tecate, a jukebox where Flaco Jimenez and Hank Williams duel over my heart heaving all its gusto out onto a bar stool on the dusty dead-end road of every dream faithlessly and fecklessly running out on tomorrow’s hopes.

“Hello ceiling,
I’m going to stare at you a while.
You know I can’t sleep,
So won’t you bear with me a while?
We gotta all stick together
Or else I’ll lose my mind,
I got a feeling she’ll be gone a long, long time.”
–“Hello Walls,” Willie Nelson

Sunsets in SanAnto always felt like the most solitary. Listening to Bob Wills still takes me “Across the Alley From the Alamo,” and I imagine walking broken rail ties through yellowed fields of stray cats and Pearl brewery fuzz. Sir Doug tells me even now that “you just cain’t live in Texas if you don’t got a lotta soul,” and so I long to gather the shattered pieces into enough small change for a Lone Star tall-boy and a Jack-in-the-Box breakfast taco, with some to spare for a VIA ride up Broadway to a dead-end motel.

I wonder if I’ll ever find myself already there waiting, down Old Austin Highway on a plywood mattress watching flies land on my eyeballs and hearing the inevitable knock on the door that brings news that surely can’t be good.

And again, I’ll dread to spend another lonely night with me, while lonely walls keep all my company. Static crackles, and another 45 falls onto the platter, with Stevie Ray making it flood, Patsy Cline sashaying my madness about like flies on a horsetail.

I can’t undo the wrong or the right. And besides, I’m not even here, but left horseless at some roadhouse far southwest, sweat and sorrow my only compass for where to go from here. So let’s have another Lone Star, pop it open over the majesty of a steel-pedal and fiddle, and let’s see how that neon lights up a long, dusty haul down south.

“Here I sit with a drink and a memory,
But I’m not cold, I’m not wet, and I’m not hungry.
So, classify these as good times …”
–“Good Times,” Willie Nelson

August 7, 2006

“BACK UP IN YOUR ASS WITH THE RESURRECTION” —GETO BOYS

Zombies Part II

I probably got stoned second-hand for the first time watching a movie with Dad.

This had to have been before the age of six, in Wichita, when my sister Leticia and I were shuttled between him and a mother soon to disappear forever. I distinctly remember once sitting in his lap while thrashing at wisps of smoke in the air, just like Dad’s cat Ho Chi Minh swatting flies. Dad and someone else – my step-mom, maybe? – laughed at my antics. “He’s trying to catch the smoke, ha ha ha ha!” Drowsy, sluggish, easily amused pot talk, to be sure.

The concept of a babysitter was something from TV, because Leticia and I went along for every ride, to dates, drive-ins, and all the drunken fall-out. (For example, the vague recollection, flavored by cotton candy and colored by lime-green troll hair, of my aunt making out in a carnival parking lot with the man who would soon break her heart.) Some of these times must have been pretty good, because the memories warm me even now with thoughts of popcorn and clown colors and ice-cream-truck soundtracks, scraps of memories of drive-in playground swing-sets and monkey bars at dusk.

Drive-in movies were a special treat, even if the early ’70s fare of meta-violent, über-exploitative, and downright lurid features usually scared the holy hell out of me. I don’t remember Leticia freaking out in public just yet – that would happen when Dad brought us along for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and again when Grandma and Irma took us to see The Exorcist – so she must not have been old enough to react. One vampire flick in particular left me with brilliant images of blood, bodies, and gore-caked fangs to reel around in my head for years. Much later, Leticia and I visited Dad on a summer visit to Fort Hood, and we went to see The Town That Feared Sundown at the drive-in as a family outing. With threateningly sexy Euro-vampires and mercilessly psychotic Texas serial killers, we bonded in the dark over nachos and brutal, aggressively ugly Technicolor images splattered across a glorious billboard-like screen in the stars, bloody murder gurgling all the while like a distorted 911 call from a field of cheap, cackling speakers.

Dad saw the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and I saw the Dawn of the Dead. And so my heritage from Dad living through the ’60s was more Manson than Woodstock, more Helter Skelter and “Gimme Shelter.” I believed in zombies long before I could imagine the Pentagon levitating. Black-and-white newsreels of riots mix in the mind with snapshots of dad’s Afro and the remembered chaos of fleeing a movie house amid my sister’s wailing, photo prints of me as a baby in a T-shirt Dad brought back from war: “VISIT VIETNAM: Fascinating, fun capitol of the world…”

Family, history, zombie.

When Leticia and I moved to Texas to live with Grandma, Mexican drive-in movies balanced out our cultural enrichment, as we feasted on enchiladas and watched triple features with a typical line-up: a ranchera flick with dudes in unbelievably expansive sombreros singing on horseback, then a raunchy sexploitation comedy with fat breasts and bean farts, and finally a border-crossing piece of social realism set to Tex-Mex tracks. Halloween at the drive-in had kids trick-or-treating from car to car, with a full slate of South of the Border horror: supernatural thrillers with Catholic motifs, jilted howling mothers drowning their children, narco-Satánico death cults sacrificing bloody extremities, and villains buried alive in karmic coffin spasms.

These memories stand out as wonderful times, better definitely than when Grandma and Irma took us to see Saturday Night Fever at the Rialto in Harlingen. This was where I’d see Scarface and Beastmaster in junior high, when I’d travel by myself via Greyhound for cheap balcony seats at the triple feature. But somehow, Travolta’s sweat-hog sexuality stuck in my pre-pubescent brain as a filmy, tacky spectacle out of a wet dream gone horribly wrong.

As the years went by, I’d get my horror fix on Saturday afternoons from Boo!, the TV B-movie feature that would get replaced by Kung-Fu Theater and Texas pro-wrestling by junior high. Back in the days of Boo!, even the grainy intro credits would get my pulse going: a child-sized, blanket-covered figure claws through the woods in the rain at sunset to find a shotgun shack with baby doll-heads littering the windows, and when the door agonizingly creaks open thunder resounds with hideous cackles, cries, and pipe-organ flourish. Awesome! Sometimes, Leticia would start screaming at just that intro!

One of these afternoons, while recording music onto cassette tapes from the radio on my ghetto blaster, I must have heard a radio spot for Night of the Living Dead. The cheap studio screams and gags made my flesh crawl with imagined thrills. “SEE PEOPLE EATEN ALIVE BY ZOMBIES BACK FROM THE DEAD!” I was not yet a teenager then, but I wanted to sneak out of the house and hang with the creatures of the night.

And when I finally was a teenager, Tio Dino visited from Peoria one Thanksgiving that we observed in Santa Rosa with Tio Ruperto and Tia Concha. Cousin Dave, my mentor in the mysteries of teen delights, rented Dawn of the Dead, which we took in after Tio Ruperto choked out a pointed, pained Thanksgiving prayer.

That early eve, I walked out with Tio Dino, Grandma, and Leticia to a desolate dirt road on a windy, dark and cold day in the Valley. On the way home, I vividly imagined families across the land fending off turkey-dinner zombies and the world slowly turning over to the walking dead.

"Zombies, man, they creep me out ..." —Dennis Hopper in LAND OF THE DEAD

July 21, 2006

"...the zombie is a different kind of terror: a body without soul, mind, volition, or speech. ...Zombies are cinematic inscriptions of the failure of the 'life/death' opposition. They show where classificatory order breaks down: they mark the limits of order." —Introducing Derrida

Above: French philosopher Jacques Derrida's reanimated corpse...

"THIS DO IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME..."

I saw more than a few open caskets growing up. Tio Jorge’s two pre-teen boys — elegantly suited and surrounded in Catholic regalia — were the most memorable. They looked serene and almost rapturous despite the brutal story Grandma told of the hit and run. The resplendent funeral parlor bespoke a final resting place far from the corruptions of farm labor and colonia drinking water.

As is the fashion of the Christ.

The recent Korean funeral for my friend Brian’s dad recalled my grandmother’s late-’90s passing, though her burial box toured from Peoria to Wichita to Texas for all the family to see. For Brian’s dad, somewhere in the northwest Chicago suburbs, Brian’s relatives paid impeccable and geometrically exact bows, as Chinese mourners in the salon next door wailed ceremoniously.

Both Grandma and Brian’s dad looked like flesh draped over brittle frame. They seemed boxed up for a very long trip.

Unlike Grandpa, who looked ready to pull himself from beyond death’s accommodations and maybe start fixing shoes, watch a baseball game, smoke a cigarette and read the Bible.

Kneeling next to him and touching his hand in the funeral parlor, I imagined him rising up whole, ready to kick the whole family’s ass back into some respect for the dead and the living and the immaterial in-between. If I’d have known Brian’s family as a kid, my bow to Grandpa would have been a perfect, 90-degree salute of recognition and submission to greatness, the one show of respect that stays in my mind as undeniably sincere and poignant.

Lowering one’s eyes and facing the ground in humility is hard to fake.

Of course, if Grandpa had reanimated ready to eat the living, I’d have had to shoot him right through the head with the pistol he kept ready in the Shoe Shop for troublemakers.

“I consider it more barbarous to eat a man alive than to eat him dead; to tear by rack and torture a body still full of feeling, to roast it by degrees, and then give it to be trampled and eaten by dogs and swine…” —MONTAIGNE, “On Cannibals”

Sometime after Grandpa’s death and before Grandma’s three burials, I watched Night of the Living Dead for the first time in my cousin Dave’s back-room shanty in the apartment where Tio Ruperto lived after taking over the Shoe Shop. Like many other nights, I scurried a few doors down afterwards to go to bed, but I couldn’t sleep for all the visions of dead bodies coming to eat me.

I slept in Grandpa’s old bed behind the Shop, and sometimes I’d wake up almost literally frozen in mid-twitch, unable to move but awake and sensing a presence that kept me bound. Often, I’d survey the gauzy shadows and strain to break free from under the sheet that I’d usually pin under my head to keep myself completely covered.

Falling asleep, I’d imagine myself dead. Waking up, I’d wonder if it had actually happened, if my muscles were cramped by rigor mortis and the dark force surrounding me had come to claim my bones still aching with growing pains and pubescent terrors of cancer, AIDS, acne.

My teenage years were still magical with suggestions of living-dead corpses, the devil picking me (of all people!) to possess, and the Donkey Lady dispatching kids with hatchets at the fabled graveyard-by-the-irrigation-canal.

But why do I still love to watch zombies topple gravestones to drink blood and chew human gristle, later to be dispatched with fireworks-displays of viscera and gouts of flesh torn jaggedly from yowling bodies in paroxysm?

"The zombies were having fun/ The party had just begun ..." —"THE MONSTER MASH"

July 17, 2006

"This, reader, is an honest book. ...my sole purpose in writing it has been a private and domestic one. I have had no thought of serving you or of my own fame...I have intended it solely for the pleasure of my relatives and friends so that, when they have lost me — which they soon must — they may recover some features of my character and disposition, and thus keep the memory they have of me more completely and vividly alive." —MONTAIGNE

On New Year's Eve 1994, I went to a rave on acid with a few friends of mine, and it was probably the last time I stayed at a party all night. Before we caught the bus, my buddy mentioned how our shadows from the street-lamps looked like the Cosby gang in Fat Albert, and those silhouettes morphed into candy canes, gummies, and black licorice.

I was wearing baggy work pants and a sweater featuring a tasteful KRAFT mayonnaise logo. During a particularly thick beat, I was dancing by myself under a pool of strobes when a woman about my age, maybe younger, danced up to me, eventually moving in synch and pressing close to my KRAFTiness.

Of course, I had no Napoleon Dynamite skills back then, and so I had no idea how to react. She danced away with a backwards glance that said "lame" and "boo hoo" at the same time. I've spent years since, wondering what she was thinking, like why me? Was it my KRAFT sweater? It had to be the sweater. I mean, she was really good looking.

And what if I'd have met her? Gotten to know her? Would I be different now? Would I be in jail, in a better job, with kids, on the street, or famous?...

Just as I wonder sometimes what happened to those near-misses and why-nots and could've-been-should've-beens. What happened to them, and what could've happened to me? A life like that Talking Heads song, "this is not my beautiful wife"? Or a grave with all the grandeur of the Taj Mahal and secrets of the Egyptian dead...?

The Japanese rudegirl with plaid skirts, multiple piercings, and immaculate leggings, who stood in the snow with me a moment before going to take pizza orders, perhaps giving me the only chance I had to kiss her without an awkward pause between endlessly bitten-off words, a chance lost in snowflakes and smoke breaks…

The Ukrainian Hare Krishna girl, wire-rimmed glasses like John Lennon and long, thick, curly brown hair, who suggested in a group of friends that we watch a Disney video she clutched lovingly, the one who asked me to come pray with her and once showed me nude pictures that some old hippie at the Heartland took of her…

The very pale blonde Swedish evangelical girl who had recently converted to Jewish Orthodox, who reached over to write down her phone number and so pressed her hands against mine…

The Latina radio DJ with platinum highlight-streaks who tried to tell my fortune, the one whose URL i.e. name I forgot as quickly as her tarot reading…

The two or three blonde waitresses with tongue piercings who I met after their shift at either the Red Line or the Oasis, with body art and bad taste in beer and a cell phone that gets turned off every now and then…

The very tan, fake-blonde Puerto Rican from Lakeview smoking menthols, with a tailbone tattoo and tight jeans, who pulled me into a booth at the club and then just looked at me, waiting…

The healthy-plump Art Institute "hottie" — that's what the sequins spelled out across her breasts on a tight, black shirt — with red hair, an Irish brogue, and a Dutch last name, the one who left bite marks and nothing more after pulling me into the lake at 5am when the bars closed and the sun came up in Rogers Park…

The willowy Houston poet with hazel hair and ebonic drawl who looked annoyed that I wouldn’t stay a few more hours, drink a few more beers, and wait out the endurance contest of hooking up with a belly full of alcohol, surely the stratum of sleep-deprived brain cells upon which dreams are made…

The Boston stewardess who pressed her phone number in my lawyer-friend’s hand at some downtown soak-hole, drunk enough to laugh at my off-color reference to her wedding ring, saying, "I got a friend you should meet…"

The goth who stared intensely at other girls wearing black when we’d go out, asking how she’d look next to this or that one, with carnivorous, gulping glances...

I wonder. And then I make a bowl of oatmeal. And then I go jogging.

And then I sleep while sweating through nightmares I'll thankfully never remember, waking with a vague feeling of something I'd like to recollect and turn over in my mind like savoring a rapidly disintegrating yet agonizingly spicy piece of hard candy.

I wonder.

July 11, 2006

"Bring Out Your Dead..."

I’ve been to the same ER room twice now, once in the winter for a really bad earache and this past Sunday night for extreme stomach pain. I don’t remember the hospital name, just how to get there in a taxi.

This time I hung out in hospital hell from around midnight to 10 in the morning. It was pretty awful, waiting there in paper-thin slippers and ass-open gowns, sweating on a stretcher in sheets heavily bleached over the ages.

People behind the gauze curtains on either side coughing, hacking for help, groaning and farting and speaking in tongues as the nurses from Trinidad and the Philippines kept a sense of humor that at times seemed uncaring, at others just right, enough to make a toothless, gurgling old woman laugh while lurching in and out of consciousness.

And then they came for blood and urine, to probe and look at me through machines

Laid out, I remembered waiting for a therapist and doctor six years ago at a public clinic in San Antonio. That felt like my most depressing moment ever, waiting all day for a doctor and praying for medication. Literally, praying.

And the waiting-room cohort of an AIDS patient with her partner, the pudgy Chicana with sunken, dark rings under her eyes, talking about not being able to sleep after her husband left, pushing a baby stroller listlessly back and forth. Or the woman with elbow-length, matted black hair whose head revolved as if on axis while legs twitched and fingers picked at her clothes.

And the half-white kid not 17 years old, telling me “We Chicanos got to stick together,” urging me to apply for a job at the clinic so we could kick it and meet his homies, talking about the medicine he took to keep from beating on people and how it’s hard to find anyone to trust in life.

Pretty pathetic, but that kid bummed smokes for me. More pathetic that it made me feel a little less alone?

In my humble piece of Chicago ER, in my gauzed-off square of tile and white towels and fluorescent glare, I tried to sleep. The hours ticked off slowly, with interruptions to get prodded and moved around, eventually displaced to an empty corner to give my spot to someone on a respirator, which made me feel foolish and greedy for my relatively slight pain.

Jagged sleep drifted me through time indistinct and achy, with breaks punctuated by powdered surgical gloves.

Hungry by morning and ready to try eating, I felt the tiny kindness of breakfast consume me, as a woman in designer glasses with a Caribbean accent and the patience to put up with my grumpy sarcasm brought me a tray. But after choking down the powdered eggs and hard toast, I was overwhelmed with weepy sentiment by the nurse’s thoughtfulness.

I wondered if, when I’m done working and doing the sum of whatever I’ll do in life, such small kindness from a total stranger will be all that I can hope for when I sit alone in a nursing home or terminal wing. I’m sure that little things like a fluffed pillow or a smile will seem then like treasures of kindness.

Over this summer, I’ve felt the weight of these past few years, their loneliness and dashed hopes and ultimate successes, experiences to learn from and be thankful for, all. But I’ve felt also the regret of sacrificing my personal life to keep a job. The times I went for whiskey alone on winter nights or, alternately, ignored my anxious solitude by working harder. That much harder.

I should be thankful, though, that on Monday morning I tore off my plastic patient bracelet and walked out of ER. Vague soreness and tender sentimentality persist.

But I just went running before I wrote this, moving steadily from a jog into a sprint, until I felt the ache of being alive, my lungs and heart and blood matching the life all around me.

July 5, 2006

“Desi — self-referential term for the Indian diaspora that refers to people and culture. The Indian version of the term ‘Latino’” —Londonstani

Written in a mix of Indian languages, ebonics, text-message-speak, British slang, and Ali-G-style club-kid doggerel, the voice of Gautam Malkani’s novel Londonstani (Penguin 2006) comes across like a romp through adolescent Anglophonic fantasies of cinematic macho-Saxon badass, from A Clockwork Orange to Trainspotting and Shaun of the Dead or even Sexy Beast, but with random knotty bits of Indo-Pakistani lingo to curry the mix with ethnic asides. Part generic juvenile adventure story and pop-multi-culti product of globalization, the book works best so far at striking poses in the style of “designer desiness,” as Malkani’s narrator calls it.

“I still use the word rudeboy cos it’s been around for longer. People’re always tryin to stick a label on our scene. That’s the problem with havin a fuckin scene. First we was rudeboys, then we be Indian niggas, then rajamuffins, then raggastanis, Britasians, fuckin Indobrits. These days we try an use our own word for homeboy an so we just call ourselves desis but I still remember when we were happy with the word rudeboy” (Londonstani 5).

This reminds of both the Afro-Brit punk who wants to go rudeboy in Sid and Nancy and the typical sub-cultural breakdowns, like stoner versus rocker versus preppie, in movies from The Breakfast Club to Dude, Where’s My Car?. But the concept of “designer desi” suggests also a sort of “ghetto fabulousness” that seems informed equally by the outrageous, astral-pimp poses of a Kanye West or Andre 3000 plus Daddy Yankee holding his crotch in one hand and his gold-nameplate chingón-bling in the other.

“U a Paki jus like me. Even tho u b listenin to U2 or someshit. Are u 2 scared 2 look at us?” (Londonstani 21).

I’m most intrigued by the formulation of “desi” through a sense of Latino culture and diaspora. I first turned on to “desi” when I discovered Punjabi and Hindi DJ house-music mixes on Devon Avenue, like TS Soundz, sold in cheap cassettes with pixilated covers, one featuring the Taj Mahal blown up by a giant UFO, called “Hindipendence Day,” and another with homeboy DJs in buffalo stances, throwing signs and rocking turbans.

But it wasn’t just the music and a whole new lexicon of “hip” found in a bootleg-video store — the looks I would get from merchants, who would eventually ask if I was “desi,” seemed to bring me into the fold of my would-be Indo-Paki peoples. I’ve used this ethnic confusion, from time to time, to get the spicier food and the deferential looks of young desis in saris on Devon.

I would blend in and Pakicize myself, if it weren’t for the fact that a language I don’t know and a homeland-village I’ve never been to will be invoked at some point. Even so, when I tell the waiter or cashier that I’ve never been to Bombay, they look at me with a smile that says, “bullshit, desi!” Like they don’t believe me.

And so, I must visit Devon soon and peep the “designer desi garms,” as Malkani puts it, ready with “Wazzup desi?” for all the Asian peoples who, in novels and pop pieces like Londonstani, are upgrading from “coolies” to cool with a little help from MTV and Bollywood.

June 20, 2006

Welcome to Mexas!

"Texas Colonias County Map," HUD Colonias Quick Facts

"This region, frequently disputed territory in the past, has emerged as neither fully American nor fully Mexican" (Richardson xii). In Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados: Class and Culture on the South Texas Border (UT-Press, 1999), UT-Pan American professor Chad Richardson compiles interviews and surveys from his Borderlife Research Project, begun in 1982. More than any other work I've read, this study captures the unique cultural wash of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, my homeland.

Identifying the true border checkpoints in the Mexican and Texas interior, Richardson proves what I felt intuitively about the Valley and border Mexico: That this region taken together exists as a nether space of neither Mexico nor the U.S., standing rather as a zone of fluid transition and hybrid identity. The book's title recognizes some of the many borderland characters that inhabited my childhood, from residents of the unincorporated and ignored colonias to the children who sell gum to survive on the streets of Matamoros and Reynosa. "Here, highly diverse groups mix, mesh, and mash into a kaleidoscope of cultural and social combinations" (3).

And my memory is nothing if not mixed, meshed, and mashed. I remember the chicle vendors calling me "gringo" as I stumbled in broken Spanish across the border to hit Mexican discos as a teen. I remember the roaming dogs and trash heaps in my Tío Jorge's colonia, where he built a house over the years and slowly helped forge a community on the fringes of enfranchisement. "[T]he fulfillment of the American dream of homeownership" came with a price: problems with drinkable water, pesticide drift from nearby fields, floods, vulnerability to crime, and the neglect of city services that we all take for granted. Just one house could include "a mixture of citizens, legal residents, quasi-legal 'guests,' and illegal residents" (51).

And I can't ever forget the morning my Grandma made her special "atole" (really, instant Quaker Oats) for my sister and me while telling us about an article she read in ¡Alarma!. "The parents fed their kids rat poison in their oatmeal to collect on insurance money, and los pobres just fell asleep on their desks at school that morning..." I thought for sure I'd die that day because Grandma poisoned us!

(According to Wikipedia, "¡Alarma! (Spanish for Alarm!) is a Mexican magazine that specializes in graphic pictures of deformed babies, obese people, traffic accidents, murder victims, etc. as well as pictures of scantily clad women." They didn't mention the stories about Virgen sightings, Thalía's underpants, riots, gay-love-triangle-killing-sprees, babies born without brains along the Río Bravo, and narco-Satánico massacres. In the days when Grandpa crossed regularly, he'd bring back copies of ¡Alarma! and lurid novelas that would sit around for me to pick up and peruse eyes all-a-goggle. Guess where I got my cruel sense of humor and taste for trashy movies? Reading ¡Alarma! on the hood of a car at the Mexican drive-inn movies before the feature while eating tacos from the concession stand...)

Richardson's book talks about the Blaxicans and white cholos — African Americans and Anglos who Mexicanized, moreso than many Mexican Americans ... myself included! — and the Central American refugees trapped at Casa Romero by 1980s immigration policies. I remember Reagan saying the Sandinistas were a two-hour drive from my house, and I scratched my head while looking at a map.

"To make matters worse, Mexicans who visit the area call local Hispanics pochos, an unflattering reference to their inability to speak standard Spanish" (121). And, in turn, we now call them fresas. For others still, we're all the same, reminding me of a joke — "Did you hear about the Latin Lover?...he's just a fucking Mexican."

Tex-Mex? Some of my friends went beyond that, beyond Spanglish even, into the realm of word poetry, becoming bricoleurs of the broken tongue. "Like many waves of immigrants before them, they and their children keep some of Mexico, take some Anglo culture, reject a lot more, and come up with some of their own. Neither Mexican nor Anglo, they have carved out a cultural niche that is unique in United States society — Mexican American, while being neither Mexican nor fully American" (182).

Now, when midwestern Mex-enthusiasts and super-subaltern activistas laugh at my longing for a real flour tortilla, I wish them a mouthful of barbacoa and Big Red — cow brains and carbonated, blood-red sugar-water — mixed with the savor of South Texas sweat, the trademarks of my authentically inauthentic Valley culture, something they'll never have and never understand but can only affect with a visit to Pilsen in threadbare thrift-store prole gear. I'll let them be the real Mexicans, because I learned long ago not to worry about such borders.

Like when we helped a primo cross, wearing the cloak of a shit-kicker Stetson and affected drawl, under the password primeval of "Yessir, 'merican citizen, yessir!"

As one of Richardson's interviewers put it, "'Being Mexican American ... is like being pulled in a tug-of-war" (241). And sometimes, I'm pulled back to the Valley in heart and mind, to the home I'll never recover and the soul of it that I'll carry forever.

June 13, 2006

"* SHALL * WE * PLAY * A * GAME * ? *"

BROKEBACK TO THE FUTURE: TECHNOLOGY RULES, TECHNOLOGY ROCKS, TECHNOLOGY WHIPS A WILD CHEETAH WITH A LEATHER BELT AND A RUSTED RODEO BUCKLE...

...more from the files of a recalcitrant graduate reduxionista...

ITEM: TED-INMD 410 Paper #1: "What are your current beliefs about the availability, accessibility, and use(s) of technology in K-12 education? What is influencing these beliefs?"

In response to the questions for this paper, I must confess my limited reference points for the use of technology in K through 12th-grade education, as I teach at the college level and have not been in a primary or secondary educational context since my own time in school years ago. Back then, in Spring 1988, I had my first and only encounter with a computer in my small-town Texas school system: Computer Math, a high-school, seniors-only course using the RADIO SHACK TRS-80 microcomputer. It was a time of wonders, in which our school had just created an honors program and there was even talk of satellite-linkup classes connecting us to all the world’s majesty. Pretty soon, we'd crack the keys to thermonuclear passwords across the globe with our sweaty South Texas fingers.

But I can’t quite remember what sort of math we actually performed in that computer class. I think it was thrilling enough to sit near the TRASH-80, as my friends had lovingly dubbed it. And then there was the momentous experience of actually sitting down at the computer for the first time, flipping the thick, heavy power switch with a reverberating thud and feeling that good, solid Radio Shack housing shudder with life.

Beyond that, the blinking, grainy cursor-dot didn’t exactly bring learning to life or take me to new pedagogical vistas. At least, the promise of a hi-tech future was something to look forward to, though all we did, really, was train in BASIC programming. What the hell did we learn? I have no idea, and I don’t have much need these days for TRS-80-assisted math. I wonder if the whole point of the class was to start the eventual, lurching process of introducing technology into the classroom and thus to bring students into a sense of what the future held.

I’ll give my high-school education the benefit of the doubt, even though I remember little from that class except for my fear of the big, orange button on the TRS-80 keyboard — there for any random joker to push and so wipe the entire screen CLEAR of all work. It was like a nuclear RE-SET button, and it haunted my nightmares.

At best, this limited experience means I am biased against technology in the classroom. At worst, this means I am one of the ignorant, old-fashioned educators who will be swept away when the Tech Revolution comes. Yes, of course: When the Tech Revolution comes, it will feature interactive streaming audio and video, whereas my teaching will be the equivalent of a TRS-80 hooked up to a dot-matrix industrial printer powered by an electrical current created by hamsters in an exercise wheel.

At least, that’s how I’ve come to feel at Truman College, where the introduction of studio classrooms has lodged challenges willy-nilly against dominant paradigms of college instruction. And so, I should probably admit my beginning assumptions for this course: As a pragmatist, I am ready to use any tool relevant to and useful in the classroom, to help enhance the learning experience and achieve the goals of any given course. Moreover, as a relatively new teacher, with roughly three years of teaching under my belt, I recognize and embrace my clean slate of experience. These starting points help keep me focused in developing and improving as a teacher, while keeping my ideas and attitude loose enough to be open to new approaches. Nonetheless, I am skeptical and conservative about radical departures from my own educational experience, which was largely free of technology and based mostly in standard lectures and discussions, especially in college.

My dearest and most exciting memories of college in particular remain the colloquia, seminars, and conferences that stoked intellectual flames and the imagination. These moments had nothing to do with technology, and so I feel that the burden of proof rests in technology to prove its worth for the classroom, especially in the disciplines of the humanities.

And yet I’m ready to find new ways of going about teaching, just as my students surely are ready for new approaches to learning. No, I don’t want to be the TRS-80 of teachers. But even so, I don’t want the dread of the metaphoric orange CLEAR button and all its doom to distract my classes from the central pursuit of college: intellectual life.

Or, as I put it in class sometimes, "I'd love to show you how to use a computer, really I would, but I sorta' have to teach literature and writing sometime in this semester, you know? Can we talk about lit now?"

June 10, 2006