Review: Between Heaven and Here. I-DJ Off-Broadway. Aural On-line Floricanto.

Review: Susan Straight. Between Heaven and Here. San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books, 2012.
ISBN: 9781936365753 1936365758

Michael Sedano

You take a wrong turn off the freeway and find yourself driving through the bad part of town.
That pair of stretch pants looking at you from the darkness, golden brown skin and beautiful face when she leans into the light, you almost want to but you press the gas to get away from that crack ho, that street whore, somebody’s strawberry.

Susan Straight pulls the key out of the ignition and has you look again. Her name is Glorette Picard, a thirty-four year old daughter, sister, mother who belongs somewhere. She’s a member of a family and important to other people. Addicted to rock cocaine, the woman is not evil. But she will do you for a rock. She’ll get in your car. “She sells sex for cash, other women get dinner,” asserts Glorette’s 17-year old honor student son, Victor. It's a job, Glorette thinks.

Glorette’s death marks a fulcrum between past and future for these people. Between Heaven and Here looks back on a family saga grown from racism and killing, then pivots on another killing to look forward to breathing life into Victor and Lafayette, Jr.’s opportunities.

Disguised as author Susan Straight’s exquisite literary velorio for a dead woman many would think insignificant, Between Heaven and Here makes the future of those two students all that matters. “Attention must be paid!” a friend says at Willy Lohman’s grave. Susan Straight pays attention to Glorette, because she was, because kids matter, and because stories like these don’t get told. Theirs are useful lives, their stories interesting, and attention must be paid.

Set against the orange groves of a Southern California city called Rio Seco, the novelist details perspectives on racism, privilege, family, and opportunity springing out of dangerous ambiguity: what killed Glorette in that alley, did Alfonso or did the competitor in the brown van "got" her? Squeezed into 234 pages, Between Heaven and Here doesn’t have space for moral imperatives or high horses. The story spotlights multigenerational family members who dig a hole and in the middle of the night to bury a murdered daughter in the back yard.

Sadly, they’re right to keep it inside the family. The extraordinary death of Glorette Picard would set off the system. Get picked up, lose your job, do time, marked for life. If you’re a 17-year old honor student and you miss your SATs because you’re picked up “associating” when all you needed was the ride, your future is City College while your white and hindu friends go to Cal. Go Bears!

Straight makes several explicit scenes about accountability, to point out the crud that comes down in black life isn’t all random eventuality or result of down home racism with palm trees. When a jailed relative gets assigned into Clarette’s wing of Juvie, the kid’s father tells Clarette “it’s on you” to protect the boy. Clarette wonders where this parent has been the boy’s first 17 years? Clarette catches hell from another side, too, a comfortable Afro Studies professor shaming the Sister, making the employee with benefits accountable for the ills of their world, "doesn’t it hurt your soul to be there?"

The family will bury Glorette and maybe granpère will track down the killer and kill in return. Life continues, the two brightly academic boys have their futures in jeopardy. Cerise worries a fight with Cody on Lafayette Jr.’s record marks the bright boy as a thug and a caution to teachers. Victor’s forced to accept community college but feels the lure of income keeping him out of the classroom at the same time his street friends keep coming around.

Grim as the world develops for this family--a decaying body to be washed, the killing avenged, the boys at a life’s precipice--Straight makes sure to provide comic relief. For instance, kids draw a cereal box stabbed through with a bloody knife because they hear “serial killer” on the news. A more archly pointed scene arises from Cerise’s sense of inferiority and a grandmother’s protectiveness. Grandmère Felonise is feeding her high dudgeon when she learns Lafayette, Jr. has been expelled because the other boy called Lafayette Jr. a nasty name, called him a “wigger.” Disarmed by the absurd name, it's not the first time names made a difference.

when Lafayette first started at the school and Cerise told her that she’d overheard the mothers at the back gate saying, “I can’t believe someone would name their kids Lexus and Chanel. Oh my God.” Cerise did the imitation perfectly. She heard these voices every day. ‘And I was thinking, Dakota, Cody, Cheyenne—you name your kids after what, places you’ve never seen?’

As a girl, Felonise flees Louisana under a tarp to escape the droit de seigneur practicing landowner Mr. McQuine. He will die for that. Felonise has spent a lifetime at odds with those people, and at the schoolyard gate, she’s fuming at the way these white people carry on, one in particular who’d talked about Felonise as if the black woman weren’t present.

This kind of woman made Cerise cry. She made Cerise cry and hide in a hallway and swallow the burning that came up from her chest. She might say welfare mama when she told the story tonight. Crack ho.
Felonise folded the woman's fingers over the ball of wet cloth and looked up at the blue eyes. Saliva. A crime. Black lashes like brooms for a tiny doll. She said softly, "These ain't contacts. My grandmere get them from a wigger." She pointed at the boy hidden in the truck. "He know," she said. "That my grandson, and when you see his mama tomorrow, in that meeting, you remember me." Her own eyes burned hot-she gave the woman the look that Raoul used to say could start the back of some one's head on fire. All she ever had-that look. And her teeth.

Grandmother Felonise gives the overbearing woman a private moment of accountability for raising her boy, Cody, to this moment, while offering the woman insight into the consequences of privilege by calling out the woman’s rudeness. For Straight, the perverse humor of the white woman’s dreadful moment culminates a lifetime of unfinished business in Felonise's life, and one of many highlights the author achieves in this superbly crafted story.

Dale gas! Floor it, and check out the scene in your rearview mirror. Objects are closer than they appear. Those people are in another world, but pay attention. Lives matter. Between here and tomorrow, our trajectory heads with deliberate speed into a single path, all other things being equal.

Mail Bag
I-DJ To Break a Leg Off Broadway

La Bloga friend, Gregg Barrios, shares great news about his stunning play, I-DJ: A queer Chicano DJ / actor spins the soundtrack of his life on the dance floor by night and by day in a gay send-up of Shakesqueer's Ham-a-lot set to a dub-step beat of ecstasy, tainted love, Rollerena and Herb Alpert.

Gregg writes, This is the first time that an original play from San Antonio has a legit run in a commercial New York City theater venue. It is also a great moment in my life as a playwright - my first show in New York City.

Visit the play's website for additional details.


Aural On-line Floricanto: Migrant Lament by Ricardo Sánchez

The Other, the character of the Anglo, occupies a substantial portion of movimiento poetry. Migrant Lament by Ricardo Sánchez' is the movement's most outspoken poem on the theme. Sánchez invests rich emotion and voice when he reads. Click here to view a video of the poet reading in 1973 at the Festival de Flor y Canto at USC. His is a virtuoso recital.

The reader in this recording disarms the poem's anger through understatement and restraint in contrast to the assertive language. In the text, Sánchez capitalizes the closing scream, "love thy master…" Sadly, I do not have the text.

Click here to hear the reading of "Migrant Lament". The reader's name has been lost, with apologies to her. She worked incredibly hard on this project.

Review: Hungry Woman in Paris is Code

Josefina López. NY: Grand Central Publishing, 2009.
ISBN: 9780446699419


Michael Sedano


From its opening paragraphs, Hungry Woman in Paris reads with the same hyperbolic first person breathlessness of a Young Adult chiclit novel. But mothers, don't let your girls read Canela's story until they're engaged--at least--if not married. And if that adventurous daughter of yours reads Hungry Woman in Paris despite your censorship, then tells you she wants to go to Paris on vacation, alone, tell her you know about the swinger sex club scene, so don't get any cochina ideas about doing a ménage a quatre right there on the dance floor. Wouldn't she prefer a nice trip to Disneylandia, instead?

Your teenage boys will keep the novel under the mattress, and share the "best parts" with all their friends.

All of which means Josefina López achieves her purposes to, in turn, amuse, shock, tempt, and taunt sundry readers lacking the good sense to recognize Hungry Woman in Paris as a deliberately outrageous pastiche of the chiclit genre, with a generous helping of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. Hemingway? Canela is the movable feast, which is part of the joke, and López' affront to prudes everywhere.

The novel is an almost complete success. I say "almost" because López' first person voice leads me to wonder if there's more than a soupçon of autobiography in this ribald tale of a failed journalist on the lam from a prima's tragic suicide and the bizarre velorio, a failed engagement, an irate mother, and her own depression. Naturally, she enrolls in cooking school.

This is not your mother's Como Agua Para Chocolate, despite the recipes and cookery. Canela stumbles her way through class, affronting classmates, seducing chefs and translators, earning a few measly Euros posing nude or helping Japanese tourists buy Louis Vuitton merchandise, and, with her typically impulsive thoughtlessness, help a Turkish woman escape her husband's vengeance. Más, she then inserts herself into the notorious riots of Arab youth contra French racism, and plays cougar to a Arabic rapper from the projects. Then...other stuff happens. This is the kind of novel that readers are advised to just sit back and let unfold.

Hungry Woman in Paris boldly takes Chicana literature into places where, like a literary Star Trek, no woman has gone before. Not that there aren't a few perplexities.

Canela comes out of Boyle Heights, a semi-successful writer but a failure to meet her Mexican-American family's standards to be a good Mexican daughter. Conflicting cultural norms play havoc with Canela's and her family's expectations. Canela's spent a lifetime fleeing them with no particular direction, and this has been further complicated by US immigration strictures. France, Canela discovers, is a lot like the US, except in many ways, worse, for immigrants.

That's right, "Mexican-American," a curious choice, given Canela's upbringing among the Mexicanas and Chicanas of Boyle Heights, her allusions to protests she's been involved in, and her kick-ass attitude to rules and external controls. Canela is conscious of the distinction, electing the binational term because "Chicana" would be too difficult to explain, with her limited French. But that's the public Canela. Yet, even the private Canela prefers the hyphenated identity term, but chafes under the oxymoron.

"No, I'm North American...Mexican-American," she tells a cabbie. "I clarified for him in Spanish. I wanted to tell him I was a Chicana, but then I would have to give him a cultural and historical lesson". The incident with the cab driver offers one of the novel's more insightful moments. Canela taunts the nationalistic driver that he can call himself Spanish if he likes, but his children, and for sure his grandchildren, will call themselves French. "It won't be up to you to determine their identity, it's up to them."

Given the extremes López takes her character, her editorial conventionality comes as a disappointment. She translates all Spanish language phrases into English, if not as an apposition in a follow-up periphrasis. The only saving grace of this irritating editorial strategy is the absence of italics. "'Hmmm,' her mother says, 'donde el va, yo ya vine.' Where he is going I've already been was my mother's way of saying she had already planned for betrayal."

When all is said and done, Canela and López want to make this one point clear: men everywhere are shits, most of them. A woman has a right to live her life in whatever fashion meets her needs, wants, desires, curiosities. Keep tasting life's treats and eventually, like the runaway Turkish bride, or Canela herself, a woman will find the man who deserves her. Or is that vice versa? Could a chiclit novel have a different ending? Probably not. López' Epilogue wraps the novel into a tidy package:

"Frenchwomen don't get fat and Japanese women don't grow old or get fat...but Latina women do. We get fat and we wrinkle, but our wrinkles come from laughing and crying. We know how to feel and eat; we know how to love and to come; we know how to live ourselves to death." In the end, readers will fulfill López' wish. It was delicious. And yes, "hungry" means horny.

Hit List Hits East Harlem

Sergio Troncoso writes about the reading experience at his blog, "Chico Lingo..."

MONDAY, MAY 18, 2009
East Harlem Cafe and Hit List Reading
Last Thursday I read at a place I am still entranced by, the East Harlem Café owned by Michelle Cruz, at 104th and Lexington in El Barrio. Two other authors from Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery, read with me, Carlos Hernandez and Richie Narvaez. A few hours before, Richie and I appeared on the Victor Cruz Show, a radio talkfest from Brooklyn. Man, did I have a good time. This is the thing about getting out there, reading and talking to people about your work. You meet new people who wow you, you get to discover what they have created, and you feel lucky. Let me count the ways.


Pancho Rodriguez and Tennessee Williams A Love Story Almost Lost to Time


Gregg Barrios sends the following news about his upcoming release. Felicidades, Gregg.

Just a heads up on the June 1st release of the trade edition of Rancho Pancho. It is the first play to be published in The Hansen Drama Series. It has a forward by David Kaplan, curator, Provincetown Tennessee Wiliams Theatre Festival. Blurbs from playwrights Nancy Cassaro (Tony n' Tina's Wedding ) and Luis Valdez (Zoot Suit ) as well as a gaggle of newspaper and magazine critics from the cities where the play has been performed.

The schedule of my first signing tour forthcoming with dates. Cities and bookstores lined up include:

Now Voyager Bookstore, Provincetown, Ma
The Drama Book Shop, New York City, NY
Borders - Garden District, New Orleans, LA

Hope my publisher can add your city or town to the tour. Meanwhile, there will be a special event in San Antonio to launch the book in June.

Be well,

Gregg

PS While the book purchase price is less expensive at B&N.com, you have to pay sales tax and shipping. At Amazon, it is at list price and you don't pay tax or shipping. But I hope you support your local independent bookstore and purchase your copy there.

http://www.amazon.com/Rancho-Pancho-Gregg-Barrios/dp/1601823312/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242611061&sr=8-3



"Rancho Pancho is a delightfully decadent love story. Through Barrios' beautiful work, we are given a bird's-eye view into the brilliant, prolific
and complex life of our greatest American playwright Tennessee Williams." – Nancy Cassaro, actress and playwright, Tony n' Tina's Wedding.

"A wonderful piece of theater... a delicious slice of history." – Luis Valdez, playwright, Zoot Suit.

Will the swallow come back to Barbara Renaud González?

Rigoberto Gonzáles sends word that his El Paso Times Review of GOLONDRINA, WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME? is posted now at http://www.elpasotimes.com/living/ci_12386618

Sounds like a good read. Per Rigoberto's review, "The narrator's name is Lucero, and like the star in her name, she proceeds to guide the reader through a border-crossing odyssey as sad and familiar as a corrido, as hopeful as the song referenced in the title, though the golondrina in question, that determined swallow, is none other than her own mother, Amada."

National Latino Writers Conference This Week in Alburquerque

This week, I'll be posting photos and updates from the conference that starts Wednesday at New Mexico's beautiful National Hispanic Cultural Center. I'll be there to conduct the workshop "Oracy: Presenting Your Work Effectively." Look for a link to my video illustrations and notes in a future La Bloga Tuesday.

That's the penultimate Tuesday of the fifth month of the year. A Tuesday like any other Tuesday, except you are here. Thank you for visiting La Bloga.

La Bloga welcomes comments and guest columnists. To share your comment, simply click the Comments counter below. If you want to share your own review of a book, an art or cultural event, click here to discuss being our guest.

Ate,

mvs

Abecedarian

Michael Sedano

I searched high and low, here, there, and everywhere, for a Unicorn but couldn't find one. Then I remembered the tunnel. It was the No on 187 March a few years ago. Approaching Olvera Street, the march route went through a dark underpass. The marchers chanted loudly to hear their voices echo off the walls as the protest headed toward the light at the end of the tunnel. Upon exiting the tunnel, off to our left the farm workers had hung a huge banner.

Then there was "X".

I was putting together my granddaughter's ABC book and didn't have a good letter "X" photograph. I had a literal "X", an old wood door on the side of a factory building. The carpenters had fashioned the portal with two cross beams from corner to corner on the 10 foot span. The paint had blistered and peeled, creating a beautiful pattern but somehow, it just wouldn't do. I settled for Xochimilco and this photo:

Here's a link to the full collection of fotos and letters. I plan to use the website as a game with my granddaughter (that's her mother with C for Cow). Any time I am sitting with my computer and my two year old granddaughter is visiting, she cannot resist the keyboard. She really cannot harm the computer by pushing random keys, sabes, but at the same time, she wants to learn how to be purposive on the keyboard. Hence, I will open her abecedarian page and show her how the left, top, and right arrows work. She can choose a letter and click the image to view and talk about alligators, ibises, the letter "F" and the number four, dragonflies and hummingbirds, "Q" for membrillo (quince), and "M" for Morro Rock, all 26 letters.

I also printed her abecedarian in book form. I used my beautiful Canon Pixma Pro 9500 machine and 13" X 19" paper. Printing two images per side, four per sheet of paper, front and back, I assembled a sturdy book of 9-1/2" X 13" pages, saddle-stapled. If I had sent the fotos to Apple, Fuji, or another of the do-it-yourself publishers, the abecedarian would have cost over $40, but would have had a hard cover, saddle stitching, and smaller size. A sheet of photo matte paper costs about $1.50. The entire book, plus a front and a back cover, required seven sheets of paper, for a total of around $13. A $27 dollar savings over sending the files to Apple.

Plus an $800 printer and pigment ink. But that's a ni modo, because with your own good-quality photo printer and 8-1/2" X 11" paper, you can print out and assemble a version on typing bond or photopaper for a few dollars, even if you print one letter per side on 26 sheets. My printer outputs what some call giclée images. These, properly conserved, will last over 100 years. Or until the kid rips apart her ABC book. Whichever comes first. (I made one for my house, another for hers. Between the parents and grandparents, I'm sure one will survive hours of play and crayolas, ¿que no?)

Charlotte's Abecedarian, as the printed book cover calls it, is one of a series of ongoing projects I'm putting together for my granddaughter and sharing with you as DIY projects of your own.

Rabbit Runs No More

You may enjoy Gregg Barrios' tribute to John Updike at the San Antonio Express-News website, My San Antonio blog. Barrios has a writer's fondness and admiration for one of our il miglior fabbros.

Note Barrios' tribute to Updike's own abecedarian, speaking of miglior fabbro.

Momotombo Chapbook

Over at the El Paso Times, La Bloga's Monday man, Daniel Olivas, is catching gente up on the growth and development of Francisco Aragon's Momotombo Press and its mission of publishing chapbooks featuring Chicana Chicano Latina Latino writers. No arroba here, ése.

Here's a section from the heart of the column, to whet your appetite:

Early in its life, Momotombo Press was dedicated to publishing only poets who had not yet had a first book. The press published four titles during 2001-03 beginning with the anthology "Mark My Words: Five Emerging Poets."

In 2003, the press narrowed its mission to focus on Latino and Latina writers, to follow more faithfully in the footsteps of the famous Chicano Chapbook Series.

Though most titles are poetry collections, the press has ventured into prose, including last year's provocative short-story collection "From Here You Can Almost See the End of the Desert" by Aaron Michael Morales.

Click the link above to read the entire coverage, or here to visit Momotombo itself.

Hammett Prize Nominees Named

The International Association of Crime Writers North American Branch announces those in the running for the honor named for the creator of Sam Spade and the Continental Op. Congratulations to all the named, including Akashic Books' and Abraham Rodriguez' South by South Bronx, that I reviewed at La Bloga back in June. The nominees are:

Heywood Gould, Leading Lady (Five Star)
Colin Harrison, The Finder: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
David Levien, City of the Sun: A Novel (Doubleday)
George Pelecanos, The Turnaround (Little, Brown)
Abraham Rodriguez, South by South Bronx (Akashic)

According to the organization's website, the Hammett Prize winner will be named in Edgar Allan Poe's hometown in October, at the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association (NAIBA) Fall Conference.

That's the first Tuesday of February 2009. I just flew in from Montreal and boy, are my arms tired. From the minus centigrades to the fahrenheit 80s. Here's to warm days and sunny attitudes for all. See you next week.

mvs

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Review: Houston, We Have a Problema

Michael Sedano

Gwendolyn Zepeda. NY: Grand Central Publishing, 2009.
ISBN: 9780446698528

Any time I read a novel about singlehood and all that implies about sex, romance, youth, careers, I am glad to be old and out of all that. What a harrowing experience to be a 26-year old single woman making exceedingly bad decisions about virtually everything that comes her way.

But then, a woman reader might take the story in a different light than a retired man. In fact, I'd recommend Houston, We Have a Problema to single men just because of that difference in perspective.

Meet Jessica Luna, men. She's easy and hot to trot. All you need is a good line and a sexy body and Jessica is in your bed on the first date. Actually, it's not even a date when Jessica falls into Guillermo's bed. Guillermo has a few things going for him. He's a painter, Jessica's an Art History major with a knack for web design. She's filled with frustration in a dead-end clerical job in the insurance business. And, although Jessica doesn't recognize the resemblance, in many ways Guillermo is a clone of her father, in the worst ways.

Meet Jessica Luna, women. Confused about her ethnicity, loves her tacos, struggles with a body image problema, resents her mother's and older sister's meddling, and finds herself attracted to bad men because, as Cindy Lauper put it once, girls just want to have fun.

Gwendolyn Zepeda plays Jessica like Shakespeare's flies to wanton boys, torturing Jessica for sport. But makes a point when the chips are down. When sister sets up a cute meet with a successful executive, Jessica falls right into the trap, but with comedic results. Jonathan has all the tools that lure Jessica--car, money, connections--but he's traditional and reluctant to take the first step. Fearing rejection by someone with her looks and allure, Jonathan doesn't recognize that Jessica has the hots for him. When she gets him into her apartment and they begin to undress, his cat allergy acts up and he flees from her grasp.

Jessica's parents have been married too long without talking, just playing their roles. Papi takes his wife for granted. La Señora feels unappreciated and resents her husband's indifference. Thirty years of marriage begin to unravel and the sisters watch helplessly, the older daughter taking the mother's side, her father's little girl sticking with Papi.

Zepeda deftly brings the conflicts up as a slap in the face to Jessica who begins to see her father's racism against whites in her own push-pull attraction to Jonathan, a bolillo like her sister's husband and friends. "You're such a cocoanut" Jessica tells her sister. The Mexicano artist, Guillermo, takes Jessica for granted just as Papi does Mami. The artist neglects Jessica for weeks on end, doesn't call until he wants sex, then resumes the pattern of indifference. When Jessica realizes how history is repeating itself, she liberates herself from the mess and becomes, finally, her own person.

There's only one oddity about the ethnicity schism that adds some life to the story, the single instance of the word "Chicano" in the text. Zepeda scatters the "Latin" label here and there--no "Hispanics" in Houston. Jessica tells a confidante, "that's how it is when you date Latinos. Dramatic. Spicy. Exciting." Jessica's childhood friend is a gay guy who takes her clubbing. Describing the dance floor, Jessica observes the shitkicker outfits on the men, and women dancing with women, then specifically notes "Young Chicanos in the latest fashions spun and shimmied on tabletops." Is that a Texas thing?

Houston, We Have a Problema is neither complicated nor earth-shaking as a novel. Readers who enjoy the sucias novels will find this one agreeable. Still, there's plenty here for a male reader wound up in dating angst to buck up, take courage, and glean a soupçon of understanding that will reduce that looming fear of women and rivals. Anyone can simply allow Zepeda to lead you along to the mostly happy ending and a few hours' diverting reading. The extensive book club material at the end might be useful to see the novel as more than a mere confection.


Not mierda, character!

In his Monday post, Daniel Olivas has a character declare a certain Frida Kahlo work a piece of shit. Now, I know, it's only fiction, but I cannot allow such a remark to go unchallenged, for two reasons. Three. First, I like the original, "Las Dos Fridas" that Daniel's character so chacun a son gouted the joy out of. Second and third, I own a couple of derivative pieces. First, is Alfredo de Batuc's pastische created for Dia De Los Muertos 1981 and printed at Self Help Graphics. It's a beautiful work featuring Los Angeles icons the Watts Towers, City Hall, and the Hollywood sign / Griffith Park Observatory dome, perhaps on fire. Second, is Artemio Rodriguez' hommage quoting the piece itself, done as a lino cut and printed at the artist's now-closed La Mano Press. Both images are © the respective artists.

Daniel, that vato doesn't deserve Juana, whoever she may be. Here's to a nice halibut dinner for him, too.

One to Watch in 2009

It's grand seeing big city newspapers recognizing literature and art, even as many folks bemoan the diminution of space devoted to art and literature. La Bloga friend Gregg Barrios has been included in the San Antonio Express-News' people to watch in 2009, along with eight other artists and writers.

Of Gregg, the website observes,

If all goes according to plan, playwright Gregg Barrios is poised for a busy year in '09.

Part of it is overflow from '08, when his play "Rancho Pancho" generated some big buzz. The piece, which delves into the little-known relationship between Tennessee Williams and Texan Pancho Rodriguez, received an enthusiastic reception when the San Antonio-based Classic Theatre performed it at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival in September. A New Jersey publisher put out a souvenir edition of the script as part of the festival, and, Barrios said, the company has plans to put out an edition in February that will be available at bookstores and online. It will include a piece Barrios wrote for the Texas Observer about his research for the play, as well as an introduction.

The full story on Gregg Barrios and the "Nine to Watch in 2009" is at http://www.mysanantonio.com/sacultura/Arts__Entertainment_151_Nine_for_09.html. My apologies to the others if you're La Bloga friends and I don't know that.


Happy New Year, gente! My gosh, here is the first Tuesday of 2009. Looking forward to a year of good reading, great fun, and your comments. To leave a comment, click on the counter below and share your views.

La Bloga welcomes guest columnists. If you have a book review, an extended response to something you've read at La Bloga, an arts/cultural event that merits coverage, by all means, click here and let's explore your invitation to be La Bloga's guest columnist.

When Zeta Met Hunter

And rascuache became gonzo

BY GREGG BARRIOS

Originally published 7/30/2008 at San Antonio Current

Nearly 40 years after an uneasy friendship between Hunter S. Thompson and Oscar Zeta Acosta created gonzo journalism, the urban legend that Thompson alone was its genesis persists while Acosta’s collaboration has been virtually whitewashed out of the picture.

Last month, on a program about the recently released documentary film Gonzo, Charlie Rose remarked: “Thompson was a maverick journalist. He is the creator of gonzo journalism — that made reporters not just witnesses but central figures of their stories.”

There is a telling moment in Gonzo that flies in the face of such assessments. It is a reenactment featuring the actual audiotapes that Acosta and Thompson made on the freewheeling road trips recounted in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

“We are looking for the American Dream, and we were told it was somewhere in this area,” Acosta says to a waitress at a roadside taco stand. Thompson then asks about the quality of the stand’s “5 for $1” tacos. Acosta’s retort is priceless: “Don’t judge a taco by its price.”

The late poet raúlrsalinas and Acosta were part of the first Floricanto Chicano Literary festival held at USC in 1973.

“Zeta was a very important person,” Salinas told an interviewer, “an optimist, a dreamer, always encouraging things to change. But the Anglo establishment exploited his talent. In his case it was Hunter Thompson. That guy stole Brown Buffalo’s gonzo style; he turned it into mass-produced merchandise.”

Oscar Z. Acosta, born a Tejano in 1935 in El Chuco, grew up in California. He later became a lawyer and part of the Chicano cultural and civil-rights movimiento in the late 1960s. He ran as a Raza Unida candidate for sheriff of Los Angeles County in 1970. Despite a minuscule campaign budget, he came in second with more than 100,000 votes. His platform: Abolish the police department.

Later that year he journeyed to Aspen to help Thompson campaign for sheriff in the Colorado town. One look at the respective campaign posters shows how Thompson appropriated the Chicano power symbol for a gonzo fist.

Shortly thereafter, Oscar approached Hunter for a favor. Would he write a piece on the death of Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar at the hands of an L.A. County Sheriff’s deputy and the cover-up by the L.A. police that had left the Chicano barrios in an uproar? “Strange Rumblings in Aztlán,” published in Rolling Stone in April 1971, was a groundbreaking piece. Acosta’s righteous Chicano flow and rascuache-influenced voice resonates passionately in Thompson’s prose. In the interaction between Zeta and Hunter, gonzo was born.

During Thompson and Acosta’s research for “Rumblings” and again after it was published, the two compadres undertook a road trip as Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo — the dope generation equivalents of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, el Gordo y el Flaco, or Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. The resultant narrative, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” appeared as a two-part series in Rolling Stone with the byline Raoul Duke.

In its 25th-anniversary tribute to “Fear and Loathing,” Rolling Stone called it a “literary byproduct” and “a happenstance of artistic genius.”

Acosta felt Thompson had betrayed him. Later, in a letter to Playboy Forum, Acosta accused Thompson of appropriating all the credit for gonzo journalism. “My God! Hunter has stolen my soul,” he reportedly told his editor. “He has taken my best lines and used me.”

Acosta threatened to sue Rolling Stone and prevent the book version from being published. The magazine relented and forged a deal: Zeta would not receive credit as co-author of Fear and Loathing, but to validate his participation in the writing, a dated photo of Acosta and Thompson in Las Vegas would appear on the back cover.

In return, Rolling Stone’s Straight Arrow Books would publish two novels by Acosta. Additionally, Rolling Stone was required to refer to him in all print publicity as “a creator of Gonzo Journalism.”

Acosta published two major American novels in the gonzo style in less than two years: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo in 1972 and The Revolt of the Cockroach People in 1973, his version of “Rumblings in Aztlán.” He was lauded as one of the first novelists of the Chicano literary renaissance. But, by the end of the following year, he vanished in Mazatlán. No one has discovered under what circumstances he died or if he is still alive.

Thompson later wrote a long, moving obituary, “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat,” in which he wrote, “Zeta was too weird to live and to rare to die.”

Still, Hunter wasn’t about to wax poetic about his friend’s death and quickly sold “Banshee” to the movies. The result? Where the Buffalo Roam, a Dumb and Dumber type comedy with Bill Murray as Hunter. Oscar’s character, played by Peter Boyle, is no longer Samoan or Chicano, but a Rumanian attorney named Lazlo.

In 1997, I met Thompson at a book signing on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. He seemed genuinely touched when I mentioned my involvement in the Raza Unida Party in Crystal City. Afterward, he offered me a ride in his limo. I had parked near the infamous Viper Room off Sunset, then owned by Johnny Depp, who later portrayed Thompson in Terry Gilliam’s film version of Fear, with Benicio Del Toro as Acosta.

Inside the limo, Thompson adjusted a wrist splint and juggled to sign my books without spilling his drink. Finally, in disgust, he handed over a roll of signed bookplates. “Let’s see if these are worth more some day.”

I had brought a copy of the 25th-anniversary edition of Fear that Modern Library had published the previous year. The famous Vegas photo was on the cover, but Acosta had been cropped out and only the quizzical Thompson remained.

I was about to ask him why he had betrayed Oscar’s legacy by approving the change when we reached my car. As I drove away, I honked at Thompson, now standing outside the Viper on the exact spot where the young actor River Phoenix had died of a drug overdose.

Hunter did his best to stand at attention, then shouted into the neon night, “¡Qué viva la raza!” He then saluted and raised his clenched fist in a sign of Chicano Power, or perhaps his own gonzo fist.

“Is Zeta a hero? A myth?” Salinas told an Acosta biographer. “I guess it depends on whom you ask. The older Chicano generation has a deep affection for Brown Buffalo, but young people know very little, if anything, about him. Tú sabes? They know almost nothing about el movimiento.” •

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Acosta gonzo

Oscar Z. Acosta’s most important work remains in print and on video. This list highlights the best.

His two gonzo novels The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People (Vintage paperbacks) contain an introduction by Thompson and an afterward by Acosta’s son, Marco.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson is required reading to see who influenced whom in this ultimate gonzo novel in search of the American Dream. The Modern Library edition also contains “Strange Rumblings in Aztlán,” the first time Zeta and Hunter appear together in print.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The Criterion Collection DVD of Terry Gilliam’s film contains a supplementary disc that spotlights Acosta. Included are a short bio, photos, a 30-minute reading of Revolt by Acosta at the 1973 Floricanto Festival, and a recording of Thompson reading his gonzo obit for Acosta.

Acosta’s gonzo reading from Revolt is also available online at:
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4138728998208728904


— Gregg Barrios

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Backgrounder: Rasquachismo

Chicano art critic Tomás Ybarra-Frausto defines rasquachi or rascuache as: “ ... a bawdy, spunky conciousness. To seek to subvert and turn ruling paradigms upside-down. It is a witty, irreverent, and impertinent posture that recodes and moves outside established boundaries. Rascuachismo is an underdog perspective.”

Current contributor and culture critic Pablo Miguel Martínez summed it up in last week’s profile of artist David Zamora Casas as “the art of making do with what you’ve got, no matter how meager, and turning it into something beautiful.”

Yolanda Broyles-Gonzáles, in her book Teatro Campesino, defined it thusly: “Rasquachismo, or the Rasquachi Aesthetic (all spellings are acceptable), encompasses a shared memory system of performance elements grounded in a working-class, underdog perspective.”

Photo captions:
Thompson and Acosta in Las Vegas in a photo dated April 16, 1971. The image appears on the back cover of the first edition of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

A 25th-anniversary Fear and Loathing (and other stories) features the same photo, sans Acosta.


La Bloga happily welcomes Gregg Barrios as our Saturday guest columnist. Thanks go to Gregg's editors at San Antonio Current for permission to reprint article and art from the July 30, 2008 issue. Click link in title to view the article at San Antonio Current. Please join La Bloga on Tuesday, August 12, 2008, for photos from the Festival de Flor Y Canto referred to in Gregg's article.