This week the glossary needs to be at the beginning.
jarana: a guitar-shaped instrument from Veracruz; looks like a 4-stringed ukele but packing double the punch with 8 strings; in recent years has become popular among mostly Mexican American activists.
son jarocho: the African-inspired, percussive music from coastal Mexico; made popular by songs like "La Bamba" and played with jarana, harp, and violin.
fandango: a participatory hours-long music celebration in Veracruz, convened for an important event during which son jarocho is played, and rhythmic stomping by men and women on a low wood riser called a tarima. In recent years Latino musicians have traveled to Veracruz to take part in, study the form, and organize fandangos in Southern California.
There's a debate going on right now in Southern California among dozens of musicians and activists who play and practice the above. The debate ranges from expletive pissing matches online to a philosophical debate over the nature of community music building and the process by which a musical practice that's spiritual to many is carried out.
It's a complicated debate about the son jarocho scene, about musicianship, when is a music student ready to breakout, and who can claim to be part of a music process that traces its roots to the indigenous, African, and European melting pot of Veracruz in the colonial period.
Dark, violent, even brutal, the radical dance works created by German choreographer Pina Bausch from the 1970s forward were nothing less than transformative, expressing through gesture, body, space, movement and sound the most profound and ineffable struggles of human life. The works also transformed entrenched ideas about dance as a form, and while they sparked questions in the U.S. about Bausch's political and ethical intent, the work was celebrated internationally.
A few years ago, German filmmaker Wim Wenders, a long-time friend of the choreographer, embarked on a film project designed to capture the power of Bausch's work using 3-D cinematography, but he gave up on the effort in June, 2009 when Bausch passed away suddenly. Pressed by the dancers in her Ensemble of the Tanztheater Wuppertal to continue the project, Wenders conceded, and resumed production. The result is Pina, a stunning film opening January 13th that not only renders the power of Bausch's work, but uses 3-D technology extremely well.
A big picture look at the region:
- What will mobility be like by mid-century in San Diego? Lots of public transit, highways, or some balance in between? The Atlantic Cities' Eric Jaffe talks about the 2050 Regional Transportation Plan in A Fight for Future of San Diego.
A study reassessing a Southern California route for the state's high-speed rail project has been completed, concluding that no changes should be made since it was first approved in 2005. Due to increased infrastructure costs between Bakersfield and Sylmar via the Antelope Valley community of Palmdale, the route was questioned last year, leading to a second look of an alternative route over the Grapevine and along Interstate 5.
"A preliminary look at the Grapevine indicated a potential to reduce the route by 25 miles, saving 7 to 9 minutes of travel time to San Francisco from Los Angeles," Authority Spokesperson Rachel Wall said last May. "It's possible that this alternative could save more than $1 billion."
I was talking with Randy the other day. He and I have lived most of our lives on the "great flat" of the Los Angeles plain and its Jeffersonian grid of right-angle streets between the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers.
We both were born in 1948 and under the sign of smog.
Having breathed the polluted stuff of Los Angeles for all these years (although Randy spent three of them in the Peace Corps in central Africa), he and I might be described as smog survivors (or merely lucky in the genetic dice roll).
The book trailer -- a short video designed to introduce a new book prior to its publication -- is a relatively new form, but Erin Cosgrove's new video (see below) for Ben Marcus' novel "The Flame Alphabet" is among the best.
The three-minute video depicts the haunting world of Marcus' novel, where the voices of children sicken and eventually kill their parents. Cosgrove, who earned an MFA in the New Genres department at UCLA, said that she was inspired by the book's incredible imagery.
Last week much of the political debate in California centered around Governor Jerry Brown's early-released budget. In a very general sense, Brown's proposal shows there is simply not enough money to pay for state services and programs, and it is unclear whether the voters will agree to tax themselves to fund those services.
There is, however, another discussion concerning politics in which there is an eye-popping amount of money to go around. This week also brought news that a candidate for the House of Representatives, former Obama Administration official Ro Khanna may have set a record by raising $1.2 million in campaign contributions in one quarter.
A big picture look at the region:
- A public records and transparency brouhaha continues in Anaheim after officials told employees to purge certain government documents. It all started with a request from the Voice of OC, and Adam Elmahrek has the story.
The making of Los Angeles in the 20th century - in popular mythology, at least - centers on palm trees and Hollywood. It would be equally accurate to say that Los Angeles' success depends on dockworkers and San Pedro.
Before the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, Los Angeles was an economic appendage of San Francisco. After 1914, Los Angeles rapidly became an international hub with connections to the Far East, Latin America, the South, and the Pacific Northwest through the Port of Los Angeles (and its twin, the Port of Long Beach).
Today, Los Angeles and Long Beach have the biggest port complex in the nation and are home to the world's sixth-busiest harbor. Their ports handle about 41 percent of all the goods shipped from China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and other Asian manufacturing centers.
The recent state Supreme Court decision to dissolve Community Redevelopment Agencies has left me with decidedly mixed feelings. Gov. Brown and others claim that CRA's commercial projects were largely unjustifiable politically and economically--giveaways to well-connected developers that the California public sector can hardly afford anymore. Most critically, opponents say that the CRA projects never seemed to really target the most blighted, development-needy areas -- i.e., inner cities -- that the agencies were meant to transform.
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