Intersections

The pop pop pop of New Year's Eve

There's nothing like laying back on New Year's Eve and taking in the sounds of the city in celebration: the rapid-fire pop of who-knows-how-many handguns and revolvers shooting into the sky. It's a tradition in Southern California and Tijuana, and my guess it goes back to the rancho days. Trouble is, this can be really dangerous, as the LAPD blog notes:

A bullet shot in the air can drop at a rate of 200 feet per second and have enough force to penetrate a roof or a human skull. The last death attributed to celebratory gunfire was nine-year-old Brian Perez, who died in 1999.

Back in the day, mom used to make us crawl on all fours from one end of the house to the other on NYE to "stay out of the line of fire." Hilarious. Happy New Gyear!

I'll take a room underwater, please *

Coolhunter flags this amazing proposed design for a resort in Songjiang, China, which is either a district in Shanghai or in Heilongiang province. It's the sort of place that I remember daydreaming about and doodling when I was little: embedded into a quarry, with "underwater public areas and guestrooms." The blog reports it's soon moving into print. Congratulations to them.

* My favorite Coolhunter post remains this brilliant run-down of street fashion photo blogs from around the world. L.A. is noticeably absent. But, more pressing is the question: Could Helsinki be the most stylish place on Earth?

Our Weekly sums up the year for black L.A. *

This is an educated guess: of all the areas of L.A. that I've seen, there is none with more local media than the Southside. Inglewood alone has several weeklies that I know of. All over South L.A., small independent papers serve their communities with unflinching local news, as well as non-local news of interest to long-time black residents and new Latin American immigrants, sometimes in both in English and Spanish.

Of course, being that they're small, many of the papers are agenda-driven or biased. But there are so many to choose from, you could always get a good handle on what's going on and what messages are being consumed by reading at least a couple. Among the South L.A. papers, Our Weekly has the strongest Web presence. Here are some links for their end-of-the-year issue:

Top stories of the year
Persons of the Year
Racial tensions simmering in Harbor Gateway
The Ancient Egyptians were black
Missing man needs meds
Brawling incidents increase
James Brown obituary

* More interesting stories are always up at The Wave papers, including the crackling good writing of Betty Pleasant.

* Photo of mural in South Central from Flickr.

Responses to 'Shades of Brown'

Want to say thanks to everyone that wrote in and responded to my LA Weekly piece "Shades of Brown," and thanks to the bloggers who weighed in as well. Here are some links:

First post by Roderick at LAObserved
LAObserved letter from Frank Sotomayor
First post by FishbowlLA
And, FishbowlLA asks a question, I answer
LAVoice says Orale
And great letters (with a highlight by Sam Quinones) over at the paper

Thanks again.

Aztec warrior tatt on the boards at Pauley

One of the stars in the top-ranked UCLA men's basketball team is center Lorenzo Mata, a 6-foot-9--that's 6-foot-9!--junior from Huntington Park. The Mexican American Mata finished with nine points and three rebounds in UCLA's win over Michigan on Saturday. La Opinion dubbed him "el Superman Azteca" in this March profile. LosAnjealous has a great post of pictures of Mata in action, with a highlight of his Aztec warrior tattoo. In La Opinion, Mata says he's "100% Mexican" and that his father left their house when Mata was very young. Naturally, he owes everything to his mother:

I dedicate all my efforts to my mother, who is from Manzanillo, Colima, who emigrated here 26 years ago with my father to seek a better life.
[skip]
She was mother and father and everyone knows it. My short term goal is to please her and make her smile.

All I want for 2007 is a Prince revival ...

Native happy holidays *

The Canadian Supreme Court has ruled that the Tsartlip Indian band of Vancouver can hunt at night, although nighttime hunting is illegal under current Canadian law, reports BBC Americas. How did the Tsartlip band win? They cited tradition and their 1852 treaty, which expressly permits the practice. In other interesting news for Native Americans, a couple weeks ago I noticed far inside the L.A. Times Business section an AP wire report that caught my eye: The Seminoles of Florida now own Hard Rock. That's right. The Hard Rock empire, all of it, is now owned by American Indians. Happy holidays. * (brought to you by Wal-Mart)

Clinton stopped by ethnic media gala *

An interesting report by Ky-Phong Tran from a bit ago. At the New American Media awards in Washington, D.C. 2008 presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton made an appearance. From Người Việt Daily News:

“A fresh political wind is blowing in Washington,” the former First Lady said. “Ethnic media represent the way the new Washington needs to connect to the new America.”
[skip]
Politicians are hounds for money, votes and access. That’s part of the business. So when the New York headliner came and made a short speech, it meant more than just a kind gesture. It meant she knew that we had access to a whole new and important voting bloc for her.

* And while I'm in the archives, here is a piece by Russell Morse that's definitely worth reading. Russell watches an immigrant rights march, tours the mayor's old hood Hazard, and then accompanies some writers from graffiti crew ALA on a bombing mission in the L.A. River. Link.

* Art by Josue Rojas.

Gestapo analogies

"This reminds me of what I read about Nazi Germany, the Gestapo coming in and yanking people up." That's what the mayor of Stillmore, Georgia told the AP after recent immigration raids left his community of working immigrants a ghost town of abandoned trailer parks and freshly torn families; undocumented parents with U.S. citizen babies. Univision ran reports where people said anyone brown- skinned or immigrant-looking was rounded up and harrassed. Immigrant rights groups are making the same analogy as the Stillmore mayor, says Reuters.

Enrique Metinides, the Metinides of Mexico **

** Post updated, July 7, 2011. See below.

Enrique Metinides, the genius Mexican photojournalist, is finally getting his due. His pictures of the daily drama of gore, true crime, human tragedy, and monumental accidents in the biggest megalopolis of the Americas have recently been shown in major galleries all over the world, including earlier this year at Blum & Poe in L.A. I met and interviewed Metinides in October at his apartment in Mexico City. The man doesn't consider himself an artist so much as a journalist. Looking at his four decades of spectacular daily images, you might say he's the best news photographer we've ever known, in any language. He started shooting for the "nota roja" pulp press at the age of 12. Throughout his career, he frequently escaped death and injury himself; the photographer was also known to drop his camera and join rescue efforts when a hand was needed.

** UPDATE: For my L.A. Times profile of Metinides, published in Jan. 2011, go here.

The New York culture media is focused this week on the man they call “The Weegee of Mexico.” Metinides’ current show at Anton Kern in Chelsea was in The New Yorker, and this week, in The New York Times. Here's that review. It discusses what I believe to be the most completely perfect photograph of “urban mayhem” ever shot: The pretty blond woman who is killed in a car accident, and as The New Yorker noted, “doesn’t seem to know she’s dead.” It’s beautiful. And from a news photo standpoint, golden. Metinides, who at all hours had one ear to the dispatch frequencies, got to the scene just as she was being covered. Metinides said she was a writer who had just gotten her hair and nails done and was walking to a reading.

* Here is Kathryn Garcia's review of the Blum & Poe show at Artnet.

** UPDATE: For more posts in Intersections and at La Plaza on Metinides, see here, here, and here.

Bei-Jing-Huan-Ying-Ni!

It's going to be a really fun 2008 Beijing Olympics. But if you're not a sucker for cute little cartoons characters meant to spread good cheer and world harmony, don't click here. It's the Olympics official mascots, Fuwa, and once you see them and read about how goddamn cute they are, you just might want to stuff them in your face and gobble them up right on the spot:

Each of Fuwa has a rhyming two-syllable name -- a traditional way of expressing affection for children in China. Beibei is the Fish, Jingjing is the Panda, Huanhuan is the Olympic Flame, Yingying is the Tibetan Antelope and Nini is the Swallow.

When you put their names together -- Bei Jing Huan Ying Ni -- they say "Welcome to Beijing," offering a warm invitation that reflects the mission of Fuwa as young ambassadors for the Olympic Games.

Dresses, buildings, dead babies

“Skin and Bones,” the show on fashion and architecture currently at MOCA downtown, initially feels like it's setting up an epic visual battle between those who make clothes and those who make buildings, with corresponding displays of clothes, then (fantastic) architectual models by Frank Gehry, then clothes, and so on. But after a while, the show begins arguing that the line between fashion and architecture is very, very thin. Visually, at least. The works that stand out are clothes that communicate as buildings and buildings that communicate as clothes. Look at Foreign Office Architects' plans for a 1997 conceptual work called “Virtual House,” and Shigeru Ban's 1995 “Curtain Wall House” in Tokyo, for architecture that works like fashion. For fashion that works like architecture, consider a piece from Hussein Chayalan's 2000 work “Afterwords,” in which a coffee table turns into a skirt. And Meejin Yoon's 2001 “Defensible Dress,” a prototype for a garment that raises defensive quills when it senses someone coming nearby, like a porcupine. By the end, the line between fashion and architecture totally evaporates. Literally. The final piece highlighted is “Blur Building,” a work from the 2002 Swiss Expo where the 'structural' enclosure is nothing more than mist.

Down the block, at REDCAT underneath Gehry's Disney Hall, curator Eungie Joo put together two delicious and disturbing solo installations by husband-wife duo Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen, artists based in Beijing. The pieces, “Restroom M” and “Restroom W,” are walled compartments that really need to be experienced to be appreciated. "Restroom M" houses a golfing green surrounded by carnival-like reflective walls. "Restroom W" is creepier: a bare, cold space, with Chinese-style squat toilets lining one wall, a huge chandelier hanging low overhead, and a macabre surprise in a corner near the exit. The works are premieres and the show is the pair's L.A. debut.

Angelino Heights, still gangsta

It's easy to forget gangs still kinda sorta rule the streets of L.A. when your neighborhood is turning into the L.A. version of the yuppifying Mission District, without the feel-good parades and excellent Mexican food on each corner. But sometimes you get a mean reminder. City News Service is reporting that the LAPD is looking for a "person of interest" in a shooting last night that left a 9-year-old girl in "grave condition":

The girl was wounded last night about 8:30 at 831 E. Kensington Road, near Sunset Boulevard, in a gang shootout that occurred across the street, said Los Angeles Department Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell. Detective Fred Faustino, who heads the homicide unit of the LAPD's Rampart Station, said "a car full of men pulled up just outside her home. One man jumped out and confronted another group of men. The man fired, the other members pulled out guns and began to shoot."

That's right up the block from my house, in a part of my neighborhood I try not to walk through at night, no matter how nice the houses are starting to look. There must a Rules of the Barrio written somewhere that explains how once you cross a street to another block, you might as well be in another area code. CNS says the girl was operated on at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles.

* Friday update: LAT story here.

On the movie I'm not seeing

Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" is doing what it was meant to do: make money, and get people talking about Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto." I'm not seeing it for two reasons. A) There's too much blood and gore in real life for me to pay money to see it wantonly depicted in films, and B) I'd probably spend too much of the viewing experience looking for reasons to get annoyed at Gibson's revisioning of the Maya. Having said that, there's plenty of good chatter about "Apocalypto" out there, starting with VivirLatino's observation that it's better to get a bootleg copy from a street vendor than it is to give Mel any of your cash. I'll be prowling Pico-Union later on with this in mind. At New American Media, good takes are found here, here, and here, where Daffodil Altan makes note of curious reaction to the film among Mexican and Central American viewers. Meanwhile, it looks like "Apocalypto" has been embraced by the Mexican press, as this article suggests. Post-script: I didn't see "The Passion of the Christ" either.

Toma reggaeton!

From Vice: "You can bitch about these day-laborer-undocumented-worker- Mexican-citizen-new-immigrants all you want but you can't deny that a lot of them are doing the dances that Americans simply cannot or will not do."

The brewing brown crisis at 'El Los Times'

"Shades of Brown"

That's the link to my piece in the current LA Weekly about the L.A. Times, my former employer, and its "Latino problem." It's long, but jammed with facts, juicy tidbits and quotes, and lots of necessary historical context. The idea came after that infamous David Hiller memo, but, as I might have expected, questions begat questions, and interviews begat interviews. Then I was directed to the Frank Del Olmo archives at Cal State Northridge and made some thrilling finds. The story grew.

In several interviews for this piece, sources took questions I posed to them and asked them right back: Why did you leave? What was your experience like? How do you think the L.A. Times fails or succeeds in reaching out to Latinos? Although I obviously have a connection to the subject, I tried approaching the story as any open, curious reporter might. To do this effectively, I had to make sure personalities, personal connections, or professional considerations would not come into play. I was concerned primarily with telling a complex tale about an L.A. institution that pretty much forged the city as we know it. Basically, the piece is a channel for exploring topics that already fascinate me: the news media, the notion of a "Latino community," identity politics, L.A. culture and history.

I spent several weeks reporting this story, and it was delayed a couple times. The paper wanted to give the piece all the room it needed. It was edited very conscientiously by Laurie Ochoa, herself a former L.A. Times staffer. The hilarious and brilliant art is by Lalo Alcaraz.

I want to thank everyone that was open and cooperative, and give a shout to all my former colleagues in Metro, who work hard and faithfully under enormous outside pressures.

* Here are all my LA Weekly pieces from 2006.

Really into those white shoes

Further evidence that The New York Times has drunk the Mexico Kool-Aid: I've just been directed to a slideshow at its magazine of fashion shots by Antonio Caballero taken in Mexico City. Yum. The photos, online at least, come with instructional captions about locations dear to my heart: Xochimilco, the Centro Historico, the slightly scary Torre Latinoamericana, the towers of Satelite, UNAM, and the National Museum of Art, one of the finest and most underrated museums in all of America. Caballero really does capture that go-go 60s vibe that still lingers over the metropolis. Mexico City could use a little more couture, of course. But they just had their first major Fashion Week. And there are many fine young designers bringing some global fashion sensibility to the D.F., such as the wonderful Enrique and Denise at Clinica in Col. Condesa. I was at their show, "Cholo by Accident," during my last visit to the D.F. in October. It featured designs inspired in part by California's barrio culture. Models wore cholo-style Loc sunglasses on the runway. More:

Mexican lady in San Antonio makes the front page

The New York Times on Tuesday ran a huge above-the-fold A1 picture of Raquel Rodríguez (and honored her Spanish accent in print), a Mexican lady in San Antonio. In a long article by Julia Preston, Rodríguez pretty much epitomizes the experience of all the hard-working, ascendant Mexican ladies I've ever known, starting with my mother Norma. Particularly the part about being seen as "Santa" when returning south of the border with gifts and supplies for relatives; that killed me. Each December, my family did the same. In the side-bar, Preston makes some broad generalizations about Mexican immigrants:

Mexicans have not always shown a passion for learning English and becoming American citizens.

The stories are part of a series called "Three Sisters."

 

Mohammad Omer, 22-year-old journalist in Gaza

New American Media has a very compelling audio interview with Mohammad Omer, a 22-year-old journalist in the Gaza Strip. Take a listen.