A Literary Detour

By popular request (meaning I got a text from my moms about it), I have decided to write about a non-musical theme. The recent deaths of Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger created a stir this week. However, I was surprised by how much praise Salinger received, overshadowing a discussion of Zinn's body of work. For example, the New York Times online version had a lead story about Salinger, while Zinn showed up only in the obituaries section. People who did pair them together, as in friends' facebook status updates, did so in a manner that made them seem compatible. I strongly disagree with this assertion.

First, J.D. Salinger.
I was required, like almost everybody in the US, to read "The Catcher in the Rye" for school. I thought it was god-awful. I never understood why a book about a disaffected adolescent from a privledged background who decides to wander around New York City after being expelled from prep school got so much praise. It just never seemed like that great of a book to me, neither the quality of writing nor the narrative impressed me. I think it ranks a distant third or fourth in an outdated genre of books about young (male) protagonists struggling to find a place while fighting the establishment (as they said back then), father figures, each other, and life's daily tragedies (everything's dramatic when you're 15). For example, "The Outsiders," "Lord of the Flies," or 'Great Expectations" fit this mold, but each presents us with some sort of moral issue in comparison to Holden's distant infantilism. These are all books that I think teachers and administrators though it would be good for us kids to read and learn valuable life lessons, while, as Howard Zinn might comment, the more valuable lessons came from the defunding of education and social welfare, the militarism displayed by nuclear posturing and the war on drugs, and the misinterpretations and erasures of significant cultural contributions and historical facts in daily classroom interactions. As my seventh grade social studies teacher once said, the Civil War was not about slavery at all (States Rights!). The commentaries about Salinger almost uniformly compared Catcher to another great American novel, Mark Twain's "Huck Finn," but I think if Huck ran into Holden in the street, he might tell him to stop whining about everybody being phony or wallowing in pity and actually leave the prison of his psyche to do something truly adventurous or heroic, like, say, helping a slave escape down river, or having fun playing adults for the fool.

Second, Howard Zinn. A popular historian in that many people read his work, he wrote history that anyone could understand, and that he eschewed the 'great man' theory of history to talk about ordinary peoples' lives. As someone who has read a lot of history books ( I was a history major in college), Zinn hit the important stuff, but in the interest of making his work accessible often left out some of the nuance and sidebars of US history, for better or worse (you decide). His was an anti-imperialist, anti-racist reading of history that paid attention to class struggles and revealed many of the erasures wrought by attempts to present a teleology of American world supremacy. Zinn, much like Studs Terkel, believed in giving ordinary people a voice and inviting them to participate by telling their own stories.

But perhaps most telling is Zinn's public life; he decided to actively participate in the struggles of his time, while Salinger turned inwards. While Zinn's life remains an open book, we may never know why Salinger became a recluse, perhaps this is why people obsess. I continue to be unimpressed.

Bass in your Face

Thought this was a cool shot. Remember, you can never have too much bass.

Ultima Nota

On Saturday, I went to go see a band, Ultima Nota, play at a Cuban restaurant in suburban Charlotte. Ultima Nota plays a mix of rock, bossa nova, boleros, and other Latin styles, covering popular songs in both English and Spanish. Or what could be called cheesy, dinner/lounge music. While it might seem like sort of a drag, the music actually sounds interesting, because they tend to change the songs up and make them their own.

What draws my attention is how gracefully they blend what might seem like disparate musical styles, playing North American pop songs like Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" with Latin American hits like Juan Luis Guerra's "Burbujas de Amor." A salsa classic follows an American pop ballad, a rock en espanol cover comes after their interpretation of Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff." But what I find out when I talk and hang out with musicians is that these are the songs they grew up with. These songs are becoming "standards" in the sense of jazz standards because everyone knows them and the songs' structures lead to easy reinterpretation. Although you may never hear these songs played back to back on the radio or pandora, here they coexist easily.

Southern Folklife Collection

http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/sfc1/

For anyone interested in southern music, particularly if you want to hear some of the early stuff, I recommend taking a look at this site, the Southern Folklife Collection homepage. Even if you can't make it to the actual library, they have five "SFC Radio" streams where you can listen to music from the collections on your computer.

Participatory vs. Presentational

Take a look at these three photographs. They were taken in order (top to bottom) within the same performance by a local Charlotte band that plays mainly covers of rock songs in Spanish (and sometimes English). In the first photo, the musicians are on stage, clearly demarcated by a physical space separating them from the audience, and as you might be able to tell, the focus is on them because everyone is looking their way. In the second photo, after playing a few songs, the lead singer has moved out into the crowd, breaching the space between musician and audience. He joins the crowd in singing along to a song everybody knows the words to. Although I wasn't quick enough to capture it on film, the lead singer even points the microphone at several audience members and lets them sing the lyrics. The audience's attention is still focused on the band, but also inward to the space in front of stage. In the third photo, I would argue that the audience's attention (and mine) is no longer focused on stage, but rather to the mass of (male) bodies dancing in a circle that has opened up in front of the stage. The musicians are accompanying the dancers who have become the center of attention. Bumping into each other, roughhousing, moshing, scrumming, whatever you want to call it, the dancers are at play; although it may look haphazard, there is a certain choreography so that no one gets hurt in what at first glance appears to be a violent style of dancing. Those on the outside of the circle are glued in to the dancing as well, whether they are looking for an opportunity to jump in, tensing their arms to protect themselves from an errant body blow, or trying to protect their girlfriends, drinks, or cameras from the melee.

Charles Keil and Thomas Turino, both ethnomusicologists, have defined different types of live musical performance into two large categories- participatory performance and presentational performance. Participatory Performance refers to when "there are no artist-audience distinctions, only participants and potential participants performing different roles, and the primary goal is to involve the maximum number of people in some performance role." Presentational Performance refers to "situations where one group of people, the artists, prepare and provide the music for another group, the audience, who do not participate in making the music or dancing (Turino 2008)." I think we can see some of the back and forth between these two types of performance here. But I'm not sure exactly what it means yet. What do you think?

Rockin' Out

Last night I went to a rock concert to see some bands.

Immigration Reform

On Tuesday, I went to a meeting/rally for comprehensive immigration reform. It was held at St.Paul's Church in Charlotte. The chapel in which the meeting was supposed to be held could not hold the number of people that showed up, so we had to move next door to a bigger building. Now that's turnout! Despite some funny translation moments, the meeting proved exciting, nothing like over 2000 people chanting "SI SE PUEDE!" to rally forces.

Check out the website: http://reformimmigrationforamerica.org/blog/
Join up and tell all your friends. Also, if you hear your backwards friends saying ignorant things about immigrants, call them on their shit. It's time we stopped policies that unjustly target working-class immigrants and violate people's human and civil rights. If you need proof just read the recent articles about deaths in immigrant detention centers, or if you read Spanish, check out your local Spanish paper.
Unfortunately the positive vibe of this night was kinda spoiled when I got home and heard the news about the earthquake in Haiti. But one positive sliver of news about Haiti comes from President Obama's decision to grant Haitian immigrants Temporary Protective Status.

The downside of a field study

The big downside to doing a field study and being away from home is being far away from the people you love. It might seem like fun going out to concerts and living it up in the Queen City (really that's what Charlotte is called, and this is NASCAR country), but it's hard work doing research and doing the long distance thing at the same time. I'd be remiss, then if I didn't tell about you about my long-time dance partner and love interest (and now wife) Daliz. Here we are in Paris dancing at the National Archives Museum (yes, for all you anthropologists out there, the archives! this is about as close as I get to studying the archives). As James Brown said, " I got ants in my pants and I NEED TO DANCE!"

Dia de los Muertos/ Day of the Dead

I also helped the Latin American Coalition organize a Dia de los Muertos event at the Levine Museum of the New South. It had dancing, altars, calaveras (both the sugar skulls and the poems/ lithographs, art and crafts vendors. And lots of good food, including a taco truck, champurrada, pan de muertos... there's no video so you'll just have to imagine. I was exhausted because I went to a concert the night before which lasted an extra hour because of daylight saving time.

Latin American Festival

Here is a video recap of the Latin American Festival.

Latin music in Charlotte

Since September, I've been in Charlotte. Here are some of the things that have happened.
For a while I volunteered at the Latin American Coalition helping Tony Arreaza out together their annual Latin American Festival. The festival had lots of great music, some local bands- Orquesta Mayor, Sin Recursos, Tropic Culture, Leydy Bonilla, Elio Carvajal- and some artists from elsewhere- Jorge Villamizar (from Bacilos) and Grupo Fantasma.
Here's Tony and I hanging out at the beginning of the day.