Thursday, November 17, 2011

Atrevete-te

Calle 13 released “Calle 13,” their first album, when I was wearing a white uniform to high school, which means that it must have been somewhere between freshman and junior year. Seventh to eighth grade boys (affectionately called "mojones" or "little turds" by the older guys) wore blue uniforms, the ninth to eleventh grade boys wore white, and the seniors had their own thing going on, varying each year—one time it was turqouise, another red, etc.

            The staple song that got everybody shaking their asses was “Atrevete-te” which won awards and used the Cumbia rhythm, a classic Colombian rhythm, an evokation of Latin American history. And that was so strange for a reggaetón album (reggaetón has nothing to do with reggae—it’s Puerto Rican hip hop). And “Atrevete-te” means “Dare-are” in Spanish. And there’s a line about Coldplay and Green Day, bands also popular in the time among the English-speaking students who always hung out by the stairs beside the library. 
             On the other side of the social spectrum, language-wise (and hang-out-wise), were the scholarship kids, who knew how to speak English, yes, but were proud of how broken they spoke it, and in turn knew all the corners of slang Spanish and most importantly Puerto Rican slang, who flaunted their rolled R's and their mastery of the slang to their English-speaking fellow students who slurred through their R's, both in English and in Spanish:

Mera mamau
(Look, you sucked cock)--Mamau comes from mamabicho, which means "cocksucker." Mama means "to suck," and it has a maternal, breast-association (mammogram, etc); bicho means "bug" in all the Spanish-speaking countries in the world, but in Puerto Rico it means "dick" or "wang" or "cock" or "penis" (think of "fag" in England vs. America). To say you are a "mamau" is to say that you are a "sucked one," or a dick after it has been sucked. And what is a dick after it has been sucked? It's a flaccid little thing, and to these guys, it was a Puerto Rican who spoke English better than they spoke Spanish.

And there was nothing like getting told that by a scholarship kid who had been raised in the hood and who wielded biceps that could break bones as well as hearts. It was the way they threw Puerto Rican at the English-speaking students. 

The scholarship kids. The ones from the projects, the ones completely different from everybody, the ones who played basketball or baseball or were Protestants—hung out on the other side of the school and looked down on the English speaking kids who liked to talk about Green Day and Coldplay and Rihanna and South Park and Bush, even though they couldn't vote for Bush or Gore or Kerry, because, you know, Puerto Ricans don't vote for the president. That's why they say we're a colony.

Anyway, here's the Atrevete-te refrain:

atrevete-te
salte
del closet
destapate
quitate
el esmalte
 deja de tapalte
que nadie va a retratalte
levantate
ponte hyper
...
Qué importa si te gusta Green-Day?
Qué importa si te gusta Col-play?

And so in English it would say something more like this:

Dare dare
Get out of the closet
Take the cap out of the bottle
Take off the lipstick
Stop covering yourself
Nobody’s going to take a picture
Stand up, get hyper.

Who cares if you like Green Day?
Who cares if you like Coldplay?


(Looks like a hooligan, right? Well, guess what, he got a degree from SCAD.)


The point is, it wasn't just women jiggling their stuff. It was men and all kinds of men, too. The scholarship kids, the rich kids--even though with them (the white ones, the rich ones) there had to be an "irony phase," where one liked Calle 13 with irony, as a joke, before one could say that, hey, this stuff is actually enjoyable.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Rhapsody in Blue

SCENE: INT. THE NEEDLE INSIDE A RECORD PLAYER, CIRCA 1924-2011—NIGHT, URBAN PREFERRED

GLISSANDO
The clarinet-wail beginning of the rhapsody may evoke, today, a morning siren headed towards a crime scene (a gunshot to the torso, head; wrinkled shell casings on the blue concrete). Tomorrow the clarinet-song beginning may be nostalgic (the horn of a ship announcing the arrival of a long-lost mother, brother, etc.). Yet another day the clarinet-chirp beginning may be the call of a morning bird (and what’s the feeling then? Oriental mysticism? Or should we stay in America?). It is in all ways still a beginning, the thirty clarinet seconds. It bodes instability, announces the coming of emotional stampedes in colors orange, jazz, and blue.



THE ORCHESTRA: 
"We are the pianos and the are horns.  We would like Gene Kelly to dance to us, we are 1950s Hollywood or 1920s Jazz or both. We could be Woody Allen drafting his new screenplay (it will be black and white, it will be set in George Gershwin, New York: zip code Lush), a jazz player drawn in zig zag lines, a Jewish artist, a SNL comedian walking to NBC studios in 1972, Wallace Shawn walking down a decayed street to see André in 1981. We are the hustle-bustle that lasts its way into the twentieth-century, United Airlines commercials. We belong to New York, and our Rhapsody is New York: morninglike grumpy and night-grungy, U. N. and Ground Zero. Sincerely yours," 

HISTORICAL MEMORY ADDENDUM:
The lessons learned from the Rhapsody in Blue Andante (otherwise known as the last minute of Manhattan [see below]), the lesson learned from a song, what is its name? 



THE CLARINET, CONT'D: can also evoke the smell of a Subway sandwich on a gutter being licked by a dirty dog that belongs to a homeless man who sings outside of the Met. His voice is blue like the year 1924, the year the clarinet sings from.

ETYMOLOGY (accompanied by piano, clarinet, trumpets)
Rhapsody, n. : a miscellany or medley
In Spanish it's rapsodia, and in Spanish one would use the female article la (as opposed to the male article el) before rapsodia, which means that it's am la rapsodia, la femenina rhapsody. In English, simpleton tongue, we have the neutral the, and the the does not have a sex attached. But la rapsodia. O, la rapsodia. Now that recalls a woman dressed in gypsy skirt and CEO shoes, or a woman dancing waltz with the upper half and salsa with the lower half, with a flare of tango in the eyes. A woman that is a woodwind voice, a rasp of brass, percussion fingers (her little finger a timpani, her thumb the drum set), piano black-and-white eyes, string-set lips (could you call that upper lip anything else than a violin?). The woman is the rhapsody, as much as the rhapsody is a medley, a fiesta of emotions and of the senses. The woman is the whore in the concert hall, the jazz in the concert hall. She is reconciliation, the whirlwind of a life lived in 16-minute frenzy, a train-ride, a walk to work, a Woody Allen monologue, a dinner with Andre, a rhapsody located in George Gershwin, New York.



Friday, October 28, 2011

The Cordillera of My Country is the Earth's Spine


Vamonos caminando
Vamonos caminando
Vamonos dibujando el camino


(Let us walk
 Let us walk
 Let us draw the path)

Monday, October 24, 2011

TV


2010:

Summer. I am browsing the night away on Facebook. 
            My friend Luis posts this short, one-paragraph note. It says something like, “I wish I could have been there, so I could spit on their faces.” It refers to some event.
            I go down the stairs because I feel that this is something that, whatever it is, I could learn about with a quick look at the television screen.
            It turns out that my father’s watching the video—playing over and over and over. It runs about five minutes. It’s a compilation of violence. Angry commentators verbally spit on it as it plays.
            That afternoon, a group of students and some professors of the beloved University of Puerto Rico (affectionately called “la Yupi” as in U. P. or “Yupee”) had been performing a sit-in at the Capitol. Short-term protesting reason: the government’s raising the tuition of the public university. Long term protesting reason: the university is slowly being privatized, a development that would make public education at the university level disappear completely from the land of Puerto Rico.
            A group of policemen with tazers and guns and shields busts in on the sit-in and starts punching away. Blood spurts. Nineteen year-olds and twenty year-olds bleed on the sidewalks, some fall on their head so hard that they lay on the street unconscious for minutes. Look at the cop’s faces and see them enjoy it. The crowd evanesces but not without an anguished scream. A frustrated, angry thing goes on between everybody, and the violence just keeps clubbing itself into people’s eyes.
            And all for sitting down.

            I stay up the rest of the night, glued to the TV as it plays the same video over and over again, like an MtV no. 1 hit.





From the Superintendent (2:09-11): "The thing is that, here, an intervention [like that of the protesters] creates a confrontation. What we did here was disperse and avoid physical confrontation. This is what the police is for."
From a police officer (2:30): "We are here preserving the order, as you can see, um."

Friday, September 30, 2011

Kid's Stuff


I was a late arriver at the book-reading party—at least compared to people I know who’ve been doing it since they were four, and still others who were being read Grimm’s fairy tales while they were in the womb, little embryos already being infused with all that dangerous lore. Yet before I voluntarily picked up that hardcover copy of Harry Potter, I had read other things. Just not books.
Sure, I often read bits from my father's copies of The Thousand and One Nights, The Book of Virtues, Aesop’s Fables, and the Bible. Then there was a book that was mine, La Flora y la Fauna del Yunque, a picture-book of the flora and fauna in El Yunque, a mountain and tropical rainforest in Puerto Rico, one of the island’s environmental and touristic landmarks. The Puerto Rican boa, a constrictive snake; the Puerto Rican parrot, in danger of extinction; the bamboos, in that festive firework formation… I would pore over all of these so many times every day. And then there were the picture cards of all the animals in the animal kingdom!!! They had come in a box, and that must have weighed at least a pound. Countless hours going over the eating habits of the cheetah, the nature of the dolphin, and trying to draw the baboon exactly as it appeared on the picture. Don’t even get me started on the dinosaur cards.
And then there are the multimedia influences: the notion of a mythological universe as expressed in RPG video games, the Super Mario universe, movies with sequels. And films, with the unavoidable way in which they make the viewer want to be a part of the filmed world: wanting to be ET’s friend, the shark hunter in Jaws, wanting to be in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
           I still feel like reading is a childish activity. The exhiliration, the intensity it produces, the way it just activates all these little mechanisms in the mind, that muscle, that ticking little muscle—it’s all like being a kid. And I wonder if that’s what I want, at the end of the day.
          And when I think of it that way, I feel it’s so strange how adults institutionalize the pleasure of reading. College professors of literature are overgrown kids who talk about what they love, the same way a kid will talk to you about Barney. The “English” Department is the Kiddie department. Whether one reads children’s literature or not, as a child or as an adult, the elemental reading muscle is childish. It’s awesome. It’s silly. And so many lives revolve around it. 

Sunday, September 25, 2011

2009: Gay Panic in the San Juan Streets


            “She—or he, or whatever—just shouldn’t have taunted him.”
            That’s Victor. He’s been our official driver since high school. He had a Cadillac. We had feet. He's got issues with self-esteem and women and such. He's a midget.
            “What?” Collectively said by me, Carlos, Norbert, and René. Or to be less confusing, I’ll just say “we,” “us,” a big majority.
            We’re in Lola’s room, in my house. Lola is our seventeen-inch Apple computer, and the room is spacious and has a plasma TV, a set of game consoles, and an exercise machine. It’s on the second floor of my house, and large windows look out to the neighborhood and the mountains beyond. Here my brothers and I play Rock Band; we in the family watch The Sopranos, Law and Order, and Steven Spielberg movies; my friends and I watch YouTube videos from our megatronic Apple computer; and we have debates about everything in the comfort of the air-conditioner breeze. Today is one such occasion. 
            “I’m not saying what he did was right,” Victor continues, “but what I’m saying, just hear me out guys, is that if he or she would have told him that, you know, he was a man dressed as a woman—he, the guy who did it, wouldn’t have gotten angry.”
            We replied: “It was la avenida 15 on a weekday night, Victor. You don’t go there looking for women.”
           He countered: “Maybe he didn’t know that, man!”
            Who “he/she” was: a man dressed in drag, hair stylist by day and prostitute by night.
            What the other guy “did” that was not right but understandable: soliciting sex from said prostituto, taking her to his apartment, fucking her on his couch, proceeding then to dismember her and decapitate her. 
            To clean up his tracks, he burned the couch.
            “But you are justifying the act, though,” we say to Victor. “You’re defending his decision, you’re—”
            “Hey, man, like, I’m not saying it was right,” Victor stumbles, “All I’m saying is, if she wouldn’t have provoked him, he wouldn’t have killed her.”
            Gay Panic--the Laramie Defense. And then there's the Twinkie defense. What was that about, hamburgers? All kinds of shit makes you kill gay people, apparently. But never with such purpose, with such verve, as this man who kindled a fire. There's something maniacal about that, something that doesn't bespeak a "panic." It goes much deeper.
            “We’re not saying that you’re saying it’s right, we’re saying you’re defending him.”
            “All I’m sayin is it’s her fault! She provoked him! She should know--”
            “What the fuck? What do you mean ‘provoked’ him? It wasn’t like this guy was surgically operated or anything. He was a thin man wearing a wig, speaking in falsetto. You can tell, you know.”
            “Well, it was dark, the queen should’ve been clear about it.”
            “Dude, you can see the Adam’s apple.”
            “He could’ve been good at pretending to have a woman’s voice.”
            “You know, you’re defending machismo. You’re defending a culture that simply accepts as fact that some people should be more afraid of getting hurt than others: that if you’re gay, that means it’s okay for people to get angry at you for being gay. Would you like it--”
            I stop. I finish the sentence in my head: Would you like it if people killed you for being a midget?
            But since I don't finish the comment, Victor rolls his eyes.
            We debate for an hour and, the effort proving futile on both sides, we go out for drinks.
            As it turns out, the lead investigator of the case is on Victor’s side. Quoted in the newspaper and all: “People who lead this type of lifestyle need to be aware that this will happen.”
            Can't be any clearer than that.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Ecclesiastes 9:11


It came first as a black blur.

Only when I heard the thump on the front of my car and the chaotic scream from below did I realize that the blur had four legs and that the shriek resembled the panicked hiss of a  cat.

It was night and this particular street had little to no lighting, with condemned and graffiti-decorated buildings to boot. It was the kind of street populated only by the occasional junky sleeping on a stoop.

I had tried to swerve, and while I managed to get the wheel out of the cat’s way, the cat’s head bashed against my car’s bumper. My car’s underbelly must have knocked it around before releasing the animal again to the street.

In the rearview mirror, I saw the cat flopping its way to the gutter, like a fish out of water.

It was a one-way street, but I hit the reverse anyway. I went back half a block, and saw the cat there, lying on the gutter, misshapen, hissing in pain. I saw lights behind me. The street was narrow, and the person driving that car would not wait for me to perform heroics.

Besides, I didn’t want to. The cat blood would have made a mess in my car, and I wouldn’t have known what to do with it. I wish I could feel bad about this, but I don’t. But why else am I writing this?

I went around and drove back up to the spot. I looked down at the gutter and saw it. A small pool of blood had formed beside its face; one of its eyes had a crimson coat; its mouth lay agape. This was a street cat if there ever was one: squalor-thin, its fur black with grey patches all over—red smudges, too.

It was frozen.

I’d killed a sentient being.

But I guess everybody needs a first time.

Don’t get me wrong—this is not a “this is what real men do” thing. But I think this is the kind of episode you have to be prepared for when you live in a city. Just one of the many small gifts of urban Puerto Rico—the random misery that could hit you at any moment, regardless of how careful you are. The hoodlum might rob you and might be coked up enough to give you chrome to the head. The policeman, in a bad mood, might decide to shoot you to bits. The bullet thrown to the air may land on your beautiful daughter’s head.

Your decision to go to McDonalds suddenly takes on a cosmic importance.

And you think you’re lucky, but you’re just as susceptible as the cat.


Don’t talk to me about meteors. It’s the bullets that hang like a black mist over us, willingly plunging.
    
But what the fuck. I was just talking about a dead cat.

Friday, September 2, 2011

Why I Write


 “I read the first ten pages of my leisure reading career while taking a shit. It was the first Harry Potter book, and I must have been nine or ten. The house was busy with the incessant Latin American energy of a family planning a quinceañero: the women’s dresses fluttering about almost as persons themselves; fathers, daughters, cousins, brothers, grandmas, and friends invited over, parachuted down from 707’s hailing from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and New York, landing finally in Maryland—all part of a family happy in its machinal effort to put up this event for the first girl of the family, while Chayanne’s voice echoed down the walls, emanating from the cheap radio that the waltzers used to practice the dance that would open the ceremony. The lucky girl with the crown was my cousin, always the center of attention. Especially then.
So I doubt anyone noticed that I spent a full twenty minutes in the bathroom, only five of which were actually dedicated to shitting.
I remember feeling at the end of it exhausted but pleased, like when you’re back from--
from a healthy morning run. You’re sweaty and your body’s sore, but it’s a welcome soreness. So did my imagination feel then: its book-cherry popped, a part of it otherwise unexplored suddenly excited, exhausted, exhilirated—”

Wait—it’s about writing. 

Ok:

“I guess I could wax Borges and tell you that I was a reader before I was a writer, or that I think that whatever a writer is, it’s the kind of person who besides dipping a blank page in his imagination—hoping to glean something more than a small anecdote from it—reads, reads, and then reads some more. And that, in this twofold process that is imagination-journeying, he arrives at a certain, oh, let’s just say it: a transcendence, building a bridge between his own experience and the experience of others.
“Which is why I’m not going to recant my Harry Potter anecdote. Because  that’s what it’s all about: sitting down and immersing yourself in your own imagination, hopefully interacting with something, a collective something that you’re in touch with beyond the words. And always yourself. Always yourself.
 “I love that word, by the way—imagination. It’s what the whole reading and writing gig is all about. About finding ways to gain access to the magical machine inside you, the particle accelerator that relentlessly likes to indulge in pure prettiness. When you read, you use the book in front of you as an excuse to create landscapes in your mind—to fill its silence with word-sounds, characters, all that jazz. And when you write, you’re scavenging your imagination for what it itself produces in between dreams. You’re picking up the pieces and playing; you’re the baby on the piano. The English language becomes a playground. And for a moment it seems endless. You’re in touch with something eternal.
“You put up a show. The curtains rise and you’re the thespian, so you don yourself with prose and quotation marks and you let it rip. And for a while, the energy of the quinceañero around you dissipates into nothingness, and you’re so absorbed, either in the writing or in the reading, that you can’t even smell the putrefied particles around you.”