Sometimes I feel like the world has pole vaulted over me. An excerpt from Fade Into You:
My grandpa’s from Echo Park. He grew up on Carroll Street, in a rundown apartment. They’d come over from Canada, the part that’s above Washington. They were French, Spanish. The last name changed somewhere along the way. Became Darling. Can’t tell you how exactly but I’ve made up tons of fun stories. Spread them thick around town. It’s a thing do when people ask. But that doesn’t matter anyway because my grandpa’s family never talked about before California. They’d cut that part out like a cancer. We burned the tip like a shoelace, made a hard gnarled new closure so the past won’t unravel.
This I do know, here’s the truth and you’ve got no choice to believe me but I’ll tell you what, I wouldn’t lie about it anyway because I think it’s cool. Were in the social registry. When Junipera Sera and his long lineage of Padre’s took off down the highway of old news and Pio Pico rode into town with his books and architecture my great, great grandfather stood in line to record our shit. We exist. I’ll tell you that.
Alta California, my girl. My woman. Queen. Open your legs and give birth to this dirty nonsense. This muck rucking nest of black magic and flickering film reels. You unforgiving greedy plot of flowers. You empty desert. You cotton ball dipped in sand. My history lies with you. I’ll make hands to that. I’ll spray paint my name across a slip of a boy to claim you. A stocky rod. A silver, shining, sad, eyed boy. Brown. White tube socks in Nike chanclas. Tiny pin pricks up and down his mocha arms. Yellow crust around the outsides of his mouth. Thick tongue trying to moisten up. SGV scarred and scabbed blue into the skin. Old English. Let’s take him. Let’s eat him alive, you and me. 1995
It's Spring! Hey rabbits, hop to! Handsome Joseph Campbell beautiful Jean Erdman. If you got it great. If you don't, meh don't sweat it. You're probably having a lot more fun anyway.
Apologies for not having blogged in one plus month. I've been writing like a mad person. The mania of a new project has settled on my shoulders and I'm blazing through it at lightning speed. I've started a new novel! My second ever. I think I'm kind of writing the one I've always sort of been dancing around writing and now just was like, fuck it. Male Americana, lets do this. Maybe this can make its way into the world? Who knows, still waiting to hear back on the first. I've also had some writing work deadlines- also very exciting things on the musical horizon- So that's where my head has been and probably will be for some time. Masculinity! I am in it. I am deep in it. I'm riding the snake that leads to the mystic river. My chariot is Sophocles and my guide is Han Solo. If you love them, desire them, no need to whisper it softly, they know, they're men! A boy, an actor. Thebans and thespians.
A man, an archetype. George Lucas filming American Graffiti. A mad man. An act. My father.
On New Years morning twenty-nine year old Esmeralda ‘Esme’ Barrera was killed after returning home from a New Years Eve party. Esme was a counselor at the Austin Rock Girls Camp, a special needs teaching assistant at a local Austin elementary school, and record store employee at Waterloo Records, a popular Austin record store. Police found her body at 3 am on the 3100 block of King Street, not far from the party she had just attended. In the same small block radius that evening two other women were attacked. According to reports a friend discovered Esme’s body at 2:45 badly injured, she phoned 911 but Esme died shortly after of her injuries. New details are still being released.
On the afternoon of January 2nd I signed into Facebook and saw the news of Esme's death in fellow journalist and friend Jessica Hopper's newsfeed, I looked below her status update and saw that my best friend from college, social worker, music lover and San Antonio native Heather Mockeridge had posted the same link. I opened the story and my heart sank. I knew that at that exact moment another good friend, feminist filmmaker and first wave riot grrl Cathy De La Cruz was on an airplane toward LAX, returning from visiting her family for the Holidays in Texas. I knew that Cathy most certainly was at the very least an acquaintance of Barrera. I also knew from looking at her last Facebook update since leaving Texas that she had not yet heard about the murder.
There is no making sense of Esme’s death. Her tragic passing is, in the words of Hopper, an ‘unfathomable’ loss to her close friends and family, it is a loss as well to the feminist, music community. I did not know Esme, in fact we had never met, but she was as important to my spiritual life as De La Cruz or Mockeridge. Across the country a network of women is mourning Esme, not just for themselves but for the women and girls she inspired, for the work she had yet to do that will not get done and most of all, as a soldier in a small yet growing network of women whose main objective is to elevate girls and women to a position of self empowerment. Women like Ann Powers, Daphne Carr, Erika ‘EMA’ Anderson, Erica Flores, Cathy De La Cruz, Sara Marcus, Tobi Vail, Christene Kings, Margaret Wappler. I mention their names because their names are important. They are just a handful of the hundreds of women who undoubtedly felt an unspoken connection to Esme’s purpose and life. Writer and queer activist Raquel Gutierrez posted that Esme’s senseless death reminded her of another tragic loss almost twenty years earlier; Mia Zapata of the punk band The Gits, who was also killed walking home. The get home safe project, Home Alive, which advocated women learning self-defense was created in the aftermath of her death. Gutierrez noted that ‘Rad women shouldn’t die before their time. Period.’ Someone else made an insightful comment underneath speaking to the self-defense classes Home Alive encouraged, “This is tragic. Self-defense classes yes, but another kind of self-defense: making sure children are raised to respect women on all levels.”
The fact that Esme died in a manner which she was working to eradicate, and almost twenty years after the death of Zapata, in an almost identical scenario is a chilling reminder of exactly how important the work that Esme and the community she belonged to is doing. If only her life could have been spared. Her death was useless. Her life was necessary. My heart goes out to her family and friends. To make a contribution to help pay for funeral expenses for Esme’s family click here. http://forouresmeb.blogspot.com/
this Walt Whitmany image courtesy of Jessica Hundley. Pinkman blows away 2011! 2011 was a pretty strange year personally, not great, not terrible- I will come to view it I believe as the year I was in between- waiting for folks to get back to me, for me to apply for things, for hard work to crystalize into something substantial. Maybe 2012 is the year all this, what seems at times endless work and waiting, comes home to roost? In any event, as usual and how I suppose most of you as well view the day to day, I don't experience life as a series of newly unfolding events, many things I discovered for the first time were in fact old to the world, as Thom Anderson says in Los Angeles Plays Itself, the present is a combination of the future and past come to rest. Here is a list in no particular order of what I enjoyed the most for the first time in 2011. Crazy Band
After waiting for things to happen, 2011 might go down as the first year since High School I didn't go to that many shows. In fact most of what I discovered music wise came from reading other critics I like instead of just seeing bands live. This was weird but also strangely normal feeling. I'm more worried that my creaky old lady styles aren't bothering me more. I love music but this year I let it take a backseat for the first time in a long time. I don't know what this means to me personally except that I hope to see more music in 2012. I'm back in the saddle at the Weekly so perhaps that will move things along. I think I experienced a depression or weird kind of PTS surrounding music last year that made me question my work in a way that was frightening. I might now just be lifting my head above ground to sniff out whats new. In any event, I really liked this short video snippet by Crazy Band. Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty and cooking! Have you seen Yotam's vegetarian cookbook Plenty? It has completely revolutionized my life. I literally cannot express the joy I have from looking at it's luscious pictures. This year I got a nice wok, a super duper blender, went to the Framers Market regularly, gardened a few small but vital veggies and renewed my commitment to a mammal free diet- I eat seafood, dairy products and eggs- and continued to try new recipes. 2011 was the year I cooked. And I'm not ashamed to say that a few things I made were AWESOME. Los Angeles Plays Itself Speaking of Thom Anderson if you haven't seen his 2004 film essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, do yourself a favor and see it. It is liquid brillz.
LA Plays Itself, Not to dethrown the former but it's predecessor LA Plays Itself by Fred Halstead is no less incredible. I saw it this year too and it blew my mind. No pun intended. Maybe a little. Here's a snippet of it.
Movies: I saw Drive and LOVED it, I love this a little more: click here for maximum awesomage Which led me to The Thief with James Caan, Michael Mann's first and only good movie. Holy snakes this shizz was good. The soundtrack is by Tangerine Dream. Bridesmaids!! Im a broken record: EMA best of best.
my tape recorder was in the show though! The same one I used for our LA Times interview. Google it if you're interested. New new new not broken record faves: Zola Jesus, Ke$ha, Austra, Men:
Off our backs was my second most played record of 2011 Adele/ Man, I loved Adele something fierce this year.
Game of Thrones!!!! I watched the entire first season in three days. Also, Breaking Bad!!! Jesse Pinkman is my new TV boyfriend. The murals of Ramona Gardens. I rented American Me from the library because I was bored and couldn't find Double Indemnity and also because I hadn't seen it since elementary school. It was as schlocky as I remembered but the DVD version came with this amazing documentary put together by EJO about the White Fence and Hazard gangs of Boyle Heights in the early 1990's, arguably when they were at their most active. Afterwards I did a little research and came across Ramona Gardens, the oldest public housing project in Los Angles and one of LA's most dangerous areas. Literally hundreds of people have died in it's confines since it opened in 1954. What was remarkable to me however- aside from being half Latina and having a vested interest in it's subject matter, also as an Angeleno- was the incredible art that proliferates there as well. The murals are famous and have been living and breathing for almost as long as it's walls have held inhabitants. More are panted all the time, the old ones are restored annually by local artists and for the most part left tag free. There is a culture of respect within Ramona Gardens to keep the murals safe and intact. They are in some small way, East LA's version of Watts Tower. Folk art created to uplift and brighten the community. The documentary was by far superior to the movie.
It then led me to this amazing short film made by the LA Times about this exchange program that happens with Homeboy Industries and a Pritchard Alabama church group.
These documentaries really got me thinking about my role as a feminist. While intellectually I know that the treatment of women in this world depends on both sexes I have primarily to this point been female focused; focusing on their self esteem, sense of bodily self worth, and their autonomy as individuals. These documentaries for the first time really opened my eyes to the fact that reaching men in a healthy way and filling them with the same feelings of importance, devoid of violence and entitlement is equally as important. That men cannot simply be asked to comply, but must also be shown compassion and understanding. I will try to be a better human to all people in 2012.
