Intersections

A traffic dream, uh, nightmare

The impolite truth about traffic, that thing everyone mentions when they mention L.A., is that it's a worse experience in San Francisco. Commutes cover shorter distances but take much longer and are far more taxing on people's patience and cosmopolitan sense of self. Streets are narrower, more crowded, and everyday about half of the East Bay is trying to cross the Bay Bridge to get into "The City." (Plus, the BART is no more extensive or useful than the L.A. Metro.) So it is with a bit of morbid glee that we read about a section of an East Bay freeway collapsing in a tanker fire early Sunday, cutting off for about 270,000 vehicles a key route to the Bay Bridge and civilization as we know it. Repairs could take months. The governor announces free rides today on all transit systems. And Chico Gino approves. No earthquake, and no one was hurt, so we can freely speculate that this might be sweet revenge for all those bad L.A. traffic jokes.

We suffer Coachella, so you don't have to

Here is my post at LA Weekly's Style Council on my Saturday at Coachella. Linda Immediato blogs also. Thanks for the tips and hellos! * Photo above, the "Coolest Person at Coachella 2007."

The misfit poet of the late Mexican bohemia: Roberto Bolaño

We are in the midst of a welcome Roberto Bolaño zeitgeist in English. The late Chilean author's novel "The Savage Detectives" has been translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer and published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Saturday's "All Things Considered" will carry this piece on the book and Bolaño put together by Mandalit del Barco, who asked me to read some segments of the novel for her report. This was a truly wonderful compliment and an immense honor. Listen tomorrow or on the Web in the future.

"The Savage Detectives" concerns the adventures and exploits of "visceral realist" poet bohemians in 1970s Mexico City. The stories and characters are based largely on Bolaño's experiences and contemporaries. James Wood in The New York Times called it a "marvelous, sad, finally sustaining novel," writing about its setting:

He places us there, in Mexico City, and reminds us of the excitement and boredom, the literary pretentiousness and ignorance, the erotic ambition and anxiety of being a young writer or reader in the company of like-minded friends.

This piece by Carmen Boullosa in The Nation describes her memories of the author, who died in Spain in 2003. The New Yorker went a couple weeks ago with this read on Bolaño by Daniel Zalewski. He describes the back-story to "The Savage Detectives" and Bolaño's activity in the Mexican capital:

He returned to Mexico City in 1974. At a café on Calle Bucareli—Mexico City’s Left Bank—Bolaño met Mario Santiago, a defiant, acidly intelligent poet of Indian extraction. The two men, along with a dozen or so friends, formed a band of literary guerrillas, whom Bolaño christened the infrarealistas. The group's aesthetic, Bolaño later said, was French Surrealism fused with "Dadaism, Mexican style." They published iconoclastic magazines and engaged in myriad forms of provocation, such as shouting out their own poems at readings given by their "enemies" in Latin America’s cultural establishment—in particular, Octavio Paz, the poet who eventually became Mexico’s first Nobel Laureate. Another prominent Mexican writer, Carmen Boullosa, has spoken of her "fear," before approaching a lectern, that infrarealistas might be lurking in the audience: "They were the terror of the literary world."

With that, friends, I'm off to Coachella, to blog live from the event for LA Weekly's Style Council, for one whole day. Always carry sunscreen.

'I'm a transsexual sportswriter'

Long-time L.A. Times sportswriter Mike Penner walked into the Times building yesterday and was stopped at the security desk because his badge photo, of a strapping blond man, did not correspond to the person standing there: a tall woman with strawberry blonde hair wearing light make-up and bracelets. Penner, 49, is now Christine Daniels. Friend Billy Witz, a sportswriter at the L.A. Daily News, told Outsports.com that Mike and Christine are like two different people:

"Mike has always been a very introspective, quiet person," Witz said. "Now I would say she's quite outgoing. [A few months ago] she performed a '60s soul routine with a group of friends, where she was really dressed up and lip-synching Diana Ross tunes. Never in a million years would Mike have done anything like that."

The website says Daniels is married to fellow L.A. Times sportswriter Lisa Dillman. Had some trouble properly categorizing this.

Newspapers and the imperatives of history

The capital of Armenia might as well be in Hollywood. L.A. has more Armenians than anywhere else in America. Which makes the media scandal of the week out of the L.A. Times all the more relevant. Word's out that managing editor Douglas Frantz killed a story about the Armenian genocide, one of the darkest episodes of war in the 20th Century, written by Armenian American staff reporter Mark Arax, for dubious reasons. Read about the latest newsroom controversy here and here. The paper's coverage of local Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day events is here. There is also a really interesting analysis of the politics of saying "genocide" by Matt Welch.

Justice for labor organizer killed in Mexico

The U.S. State Department is pressing for a full investigation of the killing of a migrant worker organizer from Toledo, Ohio, Santiago Rafael Cruz, in Monterrey, Mexico earlier this month. The United Farm Workers sent out an alert on Wednesday urging for the same. Cruz was killed at the Monterrey office of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) on April 9. He was found gagged and beaten. Milenio says labor organizers in Monterrey face constant harassment. Meanwhile, The Christian Science Moniter reports that violence is on the rise along the border as controls tighten.

Our unlikely welcome mat in the stars

Astronomers have discovered an Earth-like planet 20 light-years away from our solar system. It is a "Super Earth" in the Libra constellation, discovered with a telescope in La Silla, Chile. These sorts of discoveries actually happen somewhat frequently. But this particular planet might have all the necessary features to sustain life. A researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told The New York Times exactly what we all hope to hear: "It's 20 light-years. We can go there." But the question is, would we be welcome? My bet is that the life-forms there -- let's call them "aliens" -- have surely been watching how we're gradually destroying our own planet and, if they're smart, will politely refuse our visit. Mars or bust?

'Poetic' is one way of describing it

Poetics of the Handmade is a show recently opened at MOCA that focuses on eight Latin American artists whose work is defined by, as the museum describes it, "intense physical processes of creation" and "finding poetry in ordinary objects and small actions." Or, artmaking that might also be described as repetitive, obsessive, and maybe a bit crazed. On Sunday I listened to a panel with seven of the artists and curator Alma Ruiz at the museum's auditorium. It was a lengthy but highly entertaining talk. Maximo Gonzalez, who installed in one whole gallery room an almost endless landscape of tiny and delicately constructed images cut out from devalued paper currency, described the entire process that went into his piece as "terrible." Everyone of course laughed.

The entire show is very rich and delightfully unsettling, when you imagine the actual work that went into it. Livia Marin took 2,200 sticks of red or reddish lipstick and crafted the tips to make forms that suggest ceramics or board game pieces. They are displayed standing in clumps on two long curving white stands. (See above.) Dario Escobar took the silver-embossing technique of the Guatemalan Baroque period and painstakingly applied it to readymades of pop culture repute: a skateboard, a table tennis paddle, etc.

The show-stealer in my view is Eduardo Abaroa, who fashioned a really breathtaking installation using his signature materials: rubber balls, glue, and thousands upon thousands, upon thousands, of blue cotton swabs:

Vindicating American Apparel

Could this video be as amazing as it is without those single-tone dancer outfits? Kill me with color and song, or give me a utopian vision of Saturdays at Echo Park Lake. It's Feist, "1 2 3 4." Have a nice week:

Thanks Bigstereo.

A howling wind, and another Korean murder-suicide *

The L.A. Times reports that on Thursday night Sook Y. Key, 42, shot her husband, Ho Yeol Ki, 44, then turned the gun on herself. It happened at their apartment on the 400 block of South Detroit Street in the Miracle Mile, the short news brief says. L.A. homicide detectives are sadly too familiar with Korean American murder-suicides. Last year the LA Weekly's Christine Pelisek reported on a string of five such cases that left Korean L.A. reeling:

The cases, which seem to revolve around a mix of financial woes, relationships and domestic-violence issues, have forced the usually private affairs of the Korean-American community into the open. "Unfortunately we have a tendency to ignore whatever weakness we have or the dark side of the community,” said Charles Kim, president of the national Korean American Coalition. "Instead of openly dealing with it, we have a tendency to hide. It is part of the culture. We know it is there but we don’t want to face the facts. We try to collectively, as a community, to ignore it and hope the families find a way to deal with it. It is considered an embarrassment."

Something else was at play this week, I believe. I'm not talking about Seung-hui Cho. The difficult issue of violence in the Korean community is now, thankfully, being widely discussed. I'm referring to the wind. All week long these howling dry winds were lashing against trees and windows in L.A., kicking up duststorms, snatching away dead palm fronds, bringing the coyotes and raccoons down from the hills. People all over the city seemed restless and nervous. Joan Didion knew the feeling:

"'On nights like that,' Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, 'every booze party ends in a fight. Meek litle wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.'"

* UPDATE: A friend points out that also on Thursday a man set himself on fire at Long Beach City Hall. Authorities identified him as Ha Ouy Nguyen. There is relief from the maddening wind today, in the form of rain.

Africa on Mexico's cultural radar

Further signs of growing interest in Mexico's African heritage -- deeply embedded in the Mexican mestizo DNA and all but forgotten for generations -- it's Africa Week in Mexico City. VivirMexico reports that a massive floor map of Africa will be on display in the vast Zocalo. DFinitivo reports on an African film festival visiting the capital. La Jornada has a story here. The enormous Reggae Music Fest took place over the weekend. Reggae is a major cultural force among youth in Mexico City, as in other parts of Mexico and within the Mexican diaspora in the United States.

Browse any of those blogs and note the breathtaking amount and variety of festivals that seem to happen in Mexico City on a weekly basis. Yet this is an especially fascinating topic (get to know President Guerrero) and cultural trend. Among books in my current pile is "African Mexicans and the Discourse on Modern Nation" by Marco Polo Hernandez Cuevas, which argues that the African line of the raza was methodically erased from the Mexican psyche during the colonial period, and has remained so since.

* Pictured above, the Zocalo, uncharacteristically barren. Previously, "Further ephemera on the flattening of the planet" and "But you don't look Mexican..."

Media fixation on Cho is getting excessive

At this hour every major news website in America has as its top image one of the photos that NBC News received today from Cho Seung-Hui. These are horrifying images. They're certainly part of the story. But I just caught a smart, angry note going around asking the media to relax on its crude exploitation of these and other superficially sensational developments, as it clearly shows a lack of respect and sensitivity for the grieving families, and plays directly into the mania of a mass murderer. Media, please stop.

Designs informed by life on the 'linea': Tanya Aguiñiga

Atwater-based furniture and accessory designer Tanya Aguiñiga, the cover feature in LA CityBeat's design issue last week, is a product of a binational upbringing. She was born in San Diego and raised in Tijuana, going back and forth every day for school, like so many students and workers still do today (including many of my friends and relatives):

"I have a really weird duality in me, because I lived in two countries on the same day, every day, for 18 years," she says.

The experience also made her acutely sensitive to the visual world. "I got used to how clean San Diego was and how everything is just perfectly paved. In Tijuana, it's all cobblestones, and I'd be, like, 'I can’t roller-skate in my street!' I became a really, really visual person because I was getting so much stimulus from both sides."

Aguiñiga worked with the noted Border Art Workshop and makes what looks like a really cool "Forest Roll," pictured above, bottom left. Here's the CityBeat link.

Reminds me: Check out this 'A Considerable Town' piece by Jim Ruland from a couple LA Weeklys ago. Ruland describes the bizarre commute of a binational worker during the period when Mexico decided to keep the traditional switch-date for Daylight Savings Time, meaning that for a few weeks Mexican time was an hour off from U.S. time. Wacky.

* Previously, "The border back-and-forth."

Spanish press focuses on Latino victims in Virginia

La Opinion and the L.A. edition of Hoy ran stories today on the two Latin American victims in Monday's massacre at Virginia Tech, Peruvian Daniel Pérez Cueva (pictured), who was 21, and Puerto Rican Juan Ramón Ortiz Ortiz, who was 26. (The papers ran wire on Ortiz Ortiz.) Two grieving fathers are quoted as basically saying, 'He was everything you could ask for in a son.' Hoy interviewed Pérez Cueva's father Flavio in Lima before he boarded a plane for Washington, D.C. yesterday. The paper also runs a piece discussing fears about a backlash on immigration reform after the shootings.

Haiyan Cheng saw killer come toward her in hallway

Washingtonpost.com has this video of a graduate student at Virgina Tech, Haiyan Cheng, recounting what happened in Norris Hall during the deadliest gun massacre in American history. Cheng describes how initial sounds of gunfire drew her and another student into a hallway, where they briefly saw the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho. Cheng says she then moved back into the classroom and others barricaded the door with a long table as Cho attempted to push in, shooting through the door with a handgun. What a piece of shit.

Today is when the heroic stories emerge. Liviu Librescu, an Israeli Holocaust survivor who died on Monday, saved students' lives by blocking a door with his own body. Sickening, numbing, depressing. I don't know what to think anymore about any of this. Guess I should just go back to the TV commercials and video games. Or Cho's play, "Richard McBeef."

* Photo by Getty Images. The wikipedia page is incredibly comprehensive.

No controles!

When Intersections previously mused on the wonders of 80's Mexican candy pop groups, we regrettably failed to link to the genre's jam of all jams, "No Controles," by Flans. Our most sincere apologies:

'Champagne in the upstairs conference room'

LA Weekly food critic Jonathan Gold just won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, the first Pulitzer for a food critic and the first for the Weekly. Read Jon's stuff here. The citation says:

Awarded to Jonathan Gold of LA Weekly for his zestful, wide ranging restaurant reviews, expressing the delight of an erudite eater.

What's cool about Jon's writing is that he'll eat anywere in his heroic quest for the best of L.A. food. Link. * And here's the AP take.

More on L.A.'s newspaper identity crisis

In Sunday's L.A. Times, author and former LA Weekly staff writer Ruben Martinez discusses L.A.'s two-paper problem, the formal and thematic differences that keep the Times and La Opinion canyons apart. Martinez, starting with an anecdote about he and his abuelita reading two papers, is right on when he describes the Times' way of writing on Others: "There is an urge to 'translate,' rather than integrate perspectives." He reports that only 0.5% of the L.A. newspaper market looks at both the LAT and La Opinion. That should say something about the hunger for bilingual media, right? But his argument is still compelling:

Maybe we need the next generation of language translation software, so that all sides can read one another. How about a multilingual newspaper? Or a paper or website that runs more than one version of the same story, contrasting points of view in the same space? It's a new city — why not truly new media?

There have been echoes of this message going around for some time now. (See here.) The possibilities are thrilling when you imagine newspapers exploring ways to break down language barriers in order to better reflect the reality on L.A.'s streets. Who will take the first step?

Carefully guided rivulets of color: Morris Louis

The paintings sometimes look like amplified studies of cellular electric activity. Others, the "veils" and "unfurleds," are perfect renderings of bright bars of color, snuggling together like gooey strips of psychadelic chewing gum. It's the work of Morris Louis, a lesser known American artist from the abstract expressionist movement. The first major survey of his work is currently at the downtown location of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. Louis worked on unprimed canvases, staining them with carefully guided rivulets of thinned acrylic paint and creating, as the museum argues, abstract paintings the likes of which had never before been seen. Because he worked mostly in Washington, D.C. (which is to say, not New York), he is not a recognizable name in the postwar American period. It is a fine survey.

The downtown space also has an installation by Brazilian Ernesto Neto, known for his freaky "membrane" pieces. For MCASD, Neto was commissioned to make a room of gob-like fabric pouches weighed down from the ceiling with aromatic spices. You walk in and feel as though you're in a cathedral designed for ecstatic Smurfs -- on mushrooms.

* Pictured above is Morris' Alpha-Phi, 1961.

Other pop royalty cultural icons of note

Here's an excellent blog response to our Mexican American Princes' package in the LA Weekly from Jim Mendiola at "Ken Burns Hates Mexicans." And while we're on the subject of close-reading cultural royalty, lets welcome back the Palestinian Princess, who was on hiatus for a while and blogs recently about her goals in life. It's time now also to give props to Adrienne Crew and her Black American Princess piece in Salon, which provided some of the inspiration for the MAP piece. (There was a movie, too!) And here's the wiki page on the most well-known of these types, the Jewish American Princess. Thank you all for the kind and thoughtful responses.

Reading: The Gringo Gazette, bitterly

Without reservations or prior experience, I tried unsuccessfully to find a peaceful, cheap hotel or hacienda along the northern Baja coast Friday night for a solitary getaway, thinking the Spring Break crowds had come and gone. Now, with all this fretting and foo-ing over the "Mexican invasion" from south to north, you hear little in comparison of what might be described as a reverse "invasion" from north to south. New developments, hotels, condos, homes are everywhere along the coast that I recall as once being treacherous and desolate when we'd take the frequent drive south from Tijuana to Ensenada to visit relatives. Along the way I picked up The Gringo Gazette, a newspaper serving Baja's new immigrant gringo population. The current Gazette leads with a story about disappointing returns on tourism dollars during Spring Break:

Many business people believe that the number one reason for tourists not coming to Rosarito is excessive police presence and harassment. [...] Other reasons for low tourist turnout are border traffic, military checkpoints, and the confusing new passport regulations.

Military checkpoints are the latest addition to the Baja scenery. But that hasn't put a damper in The Gringo Gazette's business; the inside of the paper is packed with real estate-related ads targeting Americans. The two invasions sort of cancel each other out, right?

I have a confession to make

I am an errant Mexican American Prince. We're everywhere, us princes. Are you one, too? Here are the signs:

• You are a “junior” or a II or III, or you are named after your grandfather.

• You have a degree from a four-year college in California. Preferably, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA or USC. (For the intra-Latino Pac-10 football-weekend parties, of course.)

• There is a wall in your parents’ house reserved for your baby pictures, graduation pictures, and framed awards and certificates.

• You took Spanish in middle school, high school and college, and can still barely speak above “menu level.”

• Your mom is the most important person in your life.

• When you go “clubbing,” you almost always wear a button-up shirt (untucked), black dress shoes, dark jeans and a nice watch.

• Your car has a Dodgers, Raiders, Mexico or UFW bumper sticker.

• You have a small collection of shot glasses commemorating trips to Baja, Cancún or Vegas, and more than a few honoring your favorite sports teams.

• You traveled to be the escort or chambelán of honor in a quinceañera in another city, or in Mexico.

• You can perform light auto-body work.

The (short) return of L.A.'s toughest art critic

That would be the famous Sinky, at Hop Louie, and he's back after a long absense at the little lounge in Chinatown. For who-knows-how-long, Sinky's bar patrons have been drawing him on drink napkins. Those foolish enough to think any old sketch will do quickly learn their lesson. Sinky might take one look at your drawing, grunt, frown, then toss your napkin in the trash. If he likes it, though, you can breath easy and proud. He'll add your drawing to his growing gallery. I had heard Sinky was sick, gone. When I saw him behind the bar over the weekend, we had a little exchange that went something like this:

Me: "You're back. You were gone."

Sinky: "Five months."

Me: "Wow. It's good you're back."

Sinky: "Not for long."

New York nabs Eungie Joo

Since I recently posted on one of her shows, it's worth noting this item at artbloggingLA on the upcoming move of REDCAT curator Eungie Joo. Joo, who earned a doctorate in ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, becomes curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City this summer. This is a loss for public contemporary art in Los Angeles, as Joo's exhibits at REDCAT have been consistently satisfying and relevant to polyglot, postmodern, multicultural L.A. Joo has been at REDCAT since the complex opened. Here's the L.A. Times item on the announcement. The REDCAT press page has information on some of the shows Joo brought there. And here is an interview interview Joo did with noted L.A. artist Mark Bradford. Congratulations to her.

Today you tell me something ... Y mañana otra cosa

Remember Gerardo and the "Rico Suave" craze of 1991? If you don't, lucky you:

Now, what came first? The chicken or el huevo?

Will the real Ricky Martin please stand up?

Cue depressing laugh track. On Saturday the L.A. Times grossly misidentified a young "Ricky Martin" in a Calendar section photo caption for a piece about the new Menudo by Agustin Gurza. They called the guy on the far left Ricky. Hmmm. Menudo is a little before my time, so I didn't know who that was when I first saw the photo, but I knew it was wrong. Ricky Martin is only one of the most recognizable faces in the entire Western Hemisphere.

Then I received a finely detailed email from former Times contributor and playwright Gregg Barrios, sent to both Gurza and I, which broke down the error: The Times put the Martin name on Nuyorican Ray Reyes (pictured at right). Barrios also supplied some wonderful detail on the other guys pictured (none of whom is actually Ricky) but it is somewhat unsuitable information for a family weblog. Gosh, this looks so terribly familiar I'll leave it up to the lede to a piece I did in December to lay out the embarrassing irony:

Agustin Gurza, a Los Angeles Times staff writer who covers Latino music and culture, was in the paper’s ground-floor cafeteria last July when he heard the young, mostly Mexican and Central American workers behind a lunch counter chatting away about an item in that day’s edition. Reventon Super Estrella, a multiband bill of several Mexican acts hosted by the Spanish-language radio station Super Estrella (107.1), had been written up as a Hot Ticket in the Calendar Weekend section. At first, Gurza saw it as a good sign that the editors had previewed a Latin music concert without his usual prodding. But his contentment was short-lived. The cafeteria kids were actually laughing about the paper misidentifying the item’s accompanying photo of singer Paulina Rubio as Thalia, another huge Latin pop star — and a Rubio rival. Not only that, Rubio wasn’t even appearing at the Super Estrella event. The workers told Gurza how the hosts of the Spanish-language TV program El Gordo y la Flaca were making fun of the paper for the error. Think of misidentifying Britney Spears as Christina Aguilera. “That’s like the worst mistake you can make, right?” Gurza recalls. “It was a mini­scandal on Latino media... I think the problem was the wire photo — the wire service had misidentified the photo. But the point is, no one in the paper knew any different.”

P.S. That was Saturday morning. As of Monday night, still no correction. And yet, it's Menudo, you say, does it even matter who each of them are? They're dressed like intergalactic boy-pops!

Faith in colors and shapes: Sol LeWitt

Minimalism is an art about faith in the primary, primitive shapes and colors that are the building blocks of our universe. Sol LeWitt, one of minimalism's masters, has died. Here is the NYT obit:

He reduced art to a few of the most basic shapes (quadrilaterals, spheres, triangles), colors (red, yellow, blue, black) and types of lines, and organized them by guidelines he felt in the end free to bend. Much of what he devised came down to specific ideas or instructions: a thought you were meant to contemplate, or plans for drawings or actions that could be carried out by you, or not.

* The piece pictured above is Four-Sided Pyramid, first installed in 1997 at the National Gallery in Washington.

Media star mayor is heading to Mexico

The final chapter of Antonio Villaraigosa's video interview with The New York Times covers his upbringing and his belief that L.A. is the new Ellis Island. The videos are geared toward New Yorkers or a national audience; L.A. people will hear many of the mayor's familiar lines and not much of anything new. He reps pretty hard for L.A., though, which is always good.

On Friday afternoon Villaraigosa's office announced a trade mission to San Salvador, Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Leon, Guanajuato, where his maternal grandfather was born. In El Salvador he will meet President Tony Saca to talk transnational gangs and in Mexico, D.F. he will meet President Felipe Calderon. Had last year's presidential election turned out as leftists and progressives across the Americas hoped (and still believe did), with a win for Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Villaraigosa, of a labor-lefty background, would have been meeting Mexico's first third-party leftist president ever. They were actually supposed to have met during the 2005 fiestas patrias in L.A. AMLO was set to visit then, but was barred from doing so by federal electoral officials in Mexico.

Either way, it's going to be an exciting time. I'm sure half of City Hall will want to tag along. Los Angeles, the second biggest Mexican city in the world, is going to be sending its first Mexican American mayor to the Mexican capital. At last year's Mexico City book fair, which I attended as a panelist, the L.A. delegation was pushed and questioned quite aggressively by the locals on immigrant rights and the proposed border wall. So I can't imagine the sophisticated chilangos, heavily leftist and nationalist as they are, will be keeping it all warm and fuzzy with Antonio when he drops by in early May.

Will the mayor ride the metro? Will he pose in front of the sun stone? Will worlds collide?

The enduring allure of the romantic cholo

Back in the day, as they say, Lil Rob was the homeboy that repped all of "the 619" in the hip-hop subgrene of Chicano rap. My older brothers and cousins would bump him along with Cypress Hill, Mellow Man Ace, Aztec Tribe, and Kid Frost. I've lost track of the movement, but it sounds like these rappers are still doing their thing. There are newer acts like Akwid and Jae-P updating the style. In December, Ben Quinones profiled rising Mexican American rap star Omar Cruz. And then there's the much smaller but hugely fascinating sub-subgroup of gay rappers who wear a hard-core cholo aesthetic (see Deadlee and his whole crew). Some of the groups, like Cypress Hill and Darkroom Familia, are effective Chicano/ African-American/Afro-Cuban hybrids. Lil Rob still does it best, though. With videos like this, it's clear why cholos or cholo-look-alikes are so romanticized and fetishized (or hated). The cholo is California's indigenous gentleman-warrior:

Notice how in the video California's barrio geography is radically compressed. In one frame Lil Rob is cruising on Whittier Blvd in East L.A. and in the next he's on Highland Ave, the old-school cruising drag in National City. At the end, he's sitting under the brilliantly muralized overpasses of Chicano Park in San Diego, with the Art Deco tower of the L.A. County-USC Medical Center rising in the background.

Graffiti writers in Vietnam

Dropped by the gallery at REDCAT this afternoon, where I usually find something interesting. The current exhibit, "Eternal Flame: Imagining a Future at the End of the World," features artists working on Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Los Angeles, and New York. A stand-out is Tuan Andrew Nguyen, who presents straightfoward oil paintings depicting streetscapes in the modern Vietnam, each employing a message of propoganda, advertising, and graffiti. Graffiti, it turns out, is a very new cultural phenomenon in Vietnam. In the rear of the REDCAT space, Nguyen shows a documentary with interviews with his country's new graffiti writers. It makes for highly compelling footage. One young female writer, 15-year-old Meo Meo, says she only does sketches for her crew because she is not strong enough handle spraypaint tips. "It is like a career where there is no salary," observes another writer.