Intersections

Antonio fall-out con't: This is feeling familiar

I'm just saying, after an outside reminder, but pretty much a year ago I called for a moratorium on the excessive "Antonio love" in the L.A. press. LAObserved had this post, linking to this piece in the L.A. Times' "Outside the Tent" feature (now in the archives), which is sort of related to this whole riff in the LA Weekly. Today, the press seems to be making up for lost time, going hard after Villaraigosa on his affair with Mirthala Salinas, and potentially, others:

Reporters bombarded him today with gossip-column questions. Inquiring journalists wanted to know: Was Villaraigosa still seeing his girlfriend, Mirthala Salinas? Should she keep her job as an anchor at Telemundo Channel 52, even though she covered the mayor while the two secretly dated? What about rumors of another relationship between Villaraigosa and a city planning commissioner?

"You know they're out there -- you know they'll come out!" one reporter shouted out to the mayor. "Were there other affairs in the last year and a half?"

And next we will begin to wonder when it's getting excessive in reverse. Is it really so new? Nope. It's simply that familiar, sweet smell of pop media, politics, and sex, till death do us in.

Lessons from 80s animation: Nothing beats an original

A bro-y review of the original (and slightly traumatic) "Transformers" feature:

Also had the bedsheets myself, back in the day. Link.

Corrido culture in the American West *

This is the kind of New York Times story you wish would never go behind the firewall  because it is so useful for people in the U.S. who are barely becoming acquainted with Mexican and Mexican American culture: "Far from Home, Mexicans Sing Age-old Ballads of New Life," by Randal Archibald. It describes the emergence of corrido culture in the American West. Corridos, a "musical news story," are now being studied at the Western Folklife Center in Elko, Nev., a laid-back cowboy and mining town where a brother of mine lives, along with my multiethnic nieces and nephews (Anglo, Mexican, Native American). This chunk is great, on defining a corrido:

Musicians and scholars debate what qualifies as a corrido. To purists, Mr. Garcia’s immigration song, though sung in the style of a corrido and with instruments common to the form, does not make the cut.

"I believe somebody has to die," said Juan Dies, an ethnomusicologist who is based in Chicago and is working with the center on the project. "But some people don’t feel that way."

The piece comes with a good multimedia feature. Also at NYT, a look at the Frida Kahlo retrospective, in honor of her centenary, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. And previously, "But do they have bullet-proof cars like 50 does?" * UPDATE: Kahlo show got coverage in the L.A. Times in mid-June. (The NYT notes in its lede that Kahlo is a "Chicana heroine.")

* Photo from nytimes.com.

Meanwhile, people keep getting killed at random

From Jill Leovy's Homicide Blog, here's another hard-to-take post, on the murder of 18-year-old Joshua Davis in the Athens area of South L.A. His parents watched him die in front of their house. Visiting a grieving family as a reporter is such an emotionally charged experience, every time; Leovy arrived unannounced two days later and writes about being treated cordially and with respect. Greg and Lisa Davis had not slept. The comments on this post are intense. Check out the crime maps at LAPD. The lesson? Be glad you've lived another day, I guess.

A requiem for indoor smoking: First L.A., then the world?

Going the way of 21st Century civilization, or a vision of Orwell, depending on your angle, England has banned smoking indoors as of July 1. The plucky Brits are figuring out ways to get around the ban, but to their great surprise, many are embracing it, says Metroblogging London:

I can't believe how completely people have adopted the strict rules. No fighting, no biting, no illicit smoking around the side of the bar or on the dark dance floor. [...] But my concerns about the creeping fungus of the police state doesn't change that, after a lovely lunch spent having a pint and reading the paper (my definition of heaven) at a great local pub, which is usually made unendurable at lunch due to smoke, I say: cheers to the ban!

In California, ever the trend-setter, we've been indoor-smoke-free since 1998. New York City enacted a ban in 2003, and Mexico City, home to some of the proudest and cockiest smokers on the planet, is currently considering its own ban. (In the last year they've also legalized abortion and same-sex marriage.) Can't imagine it working in Mexico, but looking at London, I suppose anything is possible.

* Photo of a couple at the D.F. airport by Renichil.

And now for some Strokes stroking

Debating The Strokes was a brief national pasttime a couple years ago because some people were disinclined to admit that this band singlehandedly spawned the new "New York Sound" and basically launched the whole look and feel of post-punk garage and its many side-effects, mainly Strokes-y streetwear, that swept the globe and still defines the moment. It was a dumb debate since the beginning: The Strokes very simply make the best modern rock music out there. Anyway, the main kid in "Transformers" wears a Strokes T-shirt pretty much throughout the movie, and this didn't bother me so much as compel me to reacquaint myself with them since they've been laying low lately. Solid, tight, pure rock, where the only torture is how good it feels. I'm sold. Again:

And that's it.

K-Pop star Rain, the "Justin T. of Asia," cancels L.A. show

Things haven't been going well in America for Jeong Ji Hun, also known as Rain, a 25-year-old K-Pop superstar from Seoul. He was supposed to have done a huge concert at Staples Center over the weekend but at the last minute the show got canceled, to the horror of weeping fans who had already started showing up. Some traveled from as far away as Japan and Canada to see him, the L.A. Times' Chris Lee reported this week. Lee breaks down the back-and-forth between Rain, sometimes called the "Justin Timberlake of Asia," and his U.S. promoters:

The cancellation comes as the capper on what the Korea Times called "perhaps the most ambitious and expensive world concert tour by any Korean artist" and on the heels of postponed Rain concerts last month in Honolulu, New York, Atlanta and San Francisco because, Kim said, tour organizers hadn't anticipated the difficulties of transporting the singer's 28 18-wheel trucks worth of stage rigging and 96-person entourage from Asia.

A lot was riding on the show: the possibility of a K-Pop crossover and raising the profile of the L.A. Korean American market (77% of tickets had been sold). Cathy Rose A. Garcia, a staffer at The Korea Times, filed this report on a Rain concert at the Tokyo Dome in May, a first for a Korean artist. On Sunday morning, Rain met with fans at an L.A. hotel to apologize. ShenYue!, a Korean pop culture blog, has more coverage here.

* Photo of Rain performing in Tokyo by AP via The Korea Times.

Pop-meta-meltdown: Mirthala announced Antonio break-up

I was going to just update the previous post because I really would rather not go overboard on the non-surprise story of an pathologically ambitious politician shagging someone in his fawning press corps, but, step away from the Internets for a day and, yaozah!, the randy Antonio beat is blowing up! All the updates are sorted at LAObserved here, here, here, here, and here. And here. Phew!

Can't do much more than give Mirthala Salinas one big hand for being so prolific in her conquests of squeeky-clean sometimes-married Mexican American Princes. Fabian? Alex? The cherry on top (for now) is the above pop-meta-meltdown image, taken by Dave Z, of Mirthala, in her news anchor role, announcing Antonio's separation from Corina on the air!! Dave Z asks in this online update: "Was this the news or a telenovela?"

And now that I've completely overspent my allowance of exclamation points, let me reprint an especially good comment from my previous post by user katynka, regarding the question of whether the mayor will have to change his name if he loses Corina's Raigosa to his Villar in the divorce: "Regarding Caro's question above - I'd like to suggest Villasinvergüenza."

Antonio's news reporter mistress revealed, finally

The Daily News finally names Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's mistress: Telemundo reporter and anchor Mirthala Salinas. Here's the link.

The news was "the get" of L.A. for 2007, with reporters at the L.A. Times, the Weekly, the DN, and certainly several others all clamoring to find enough sources who would confirm it. Congrats, as it were, to Beth Barrett. LAObserved has this good summary post. With speculation going back as far as late January as to what was going on in the mayor's marraige, it really is incredible it's taken this long for Salinas' name to come out. (Interesting how the L.A. Times basically gave the mayor free ad space in February to try to squash the rumor.)

In any event, this is relevant because the mayor, by his own design, is as pop as Paris Hilton. And because there's an obvious ethical line being crossed by both parties. Otherwise, it's pretty sad. For him, for his family, for L.A. you might say. (There goes a whole half of the mayor's last name...)

* Photo from the Daily News of Mirthala interviewing Antonio at Factor's Famous Deli in May 2005, during the campaign, which I helped cover at the L.A. Times. Antonio, full of promise, went behind the deli counter to bearhug immigrant cooks and meatcutters.

** Possible updates later.

The immigration reform meltdown: Blame the old lady in Utah

More of the same, more of the same, the U.S. government seems to be saying, after the monumental collapse of the immigration reform bill in the Senate last week. A "triple shipwreck," according to an editorial in respected left-leaning Mexican daily La Jornada, and pretty much the majority of reasonable voices in Mexico:

The most powerful country on the planet will have to continue living, for many more months, with the scandalous contradiction between its laws and the real needs of its economy, thirsty for cheap labor to guarantee the international competitiveness of its exports, especially in agriculture.

Could the survival of the status quo be any more self-defeating? Why, yes, The New York Times reports in this piece on the what the vote means for GOP efforts to woo future voters in a browning America: "In terms of the politics of perception, Hispanics may have been deeply alienated by the heated rhetoric that wound around the axle of the debate, most of it stemming from a few Republican opponents and the loud echo chamber of talk radio."

USA Today chimes in the topic, too, in "Hispanics turning back to Democrats for 2008." It's the shitty, racist rhetoric, of course. I mean, even Wonkette gets it. But sadly, not 76-year-old Laura Stevens, in Logan, Utah. She's banned from riding public buses for "harrassing" Mexican moms with what she deems as too many kids. I honestly didn't believe they made old ladies like that anymore. Silly me.

* As linked above, say hello to Guanabee, a new Latino pop culture blog out of New York. Looks like fun.

For East L.A. cityhood, with some conditions

Caught this late off View from a Loft: Blogger EL CHAVO has some suggestions for the movement to have East L.A. become an incorporated city (again): "The main condition, the one that got me thinking about this: make Spanish one of the official languages. Of course, along with English, Chinese (Monterey Park is next door, you need to be good neighbors), Japanese, Spanglish, Calo, Pocho-Spanish (that abrasive tongue of the 2nd and 3rd generation Chicano), and a few others I know I'm missing." Link.

* Photo of a brilliant example of L.A. Spanglish by EL CHAVO! (In proper Spanish, "quarter" is "peseta." Wait, "proper"?)

Vengeance, lost loves, and Mexico: Natural fits

Just a few miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border today, I'm thinking about "Paint the Town Red," an incredibly morbid new song by Ima Robot about a lover killing for revenge. It's also very exciting to listen to. Ima Robot has been doing the song lately on the L.A. museum "all-night party" circuit. Good for us:

The L.A. based-band also recently took their hyper-fashionable geeky dance-rock to Mexico. Guitarist Filip shot this wonderful video, with a great background track of a song written by singer Alex, inspired by the trip:

And in case you're wondering whatever happened to leftist champion Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the "legitimate president," deferred, The Houston Chronicle has this welcome update. Hint: He's not giving up.