Gratias á Lulu, Esta Noche y Monica Naranjo

In 2010 I began to exchange emails with several men about Latin music and gay Madrid. I hope to learn a lot about Latin music and my new correspondents were great resources. But there is one Latina star I already admire enormously.

When I took visiting friends out for a night on the town in San Francisco, I tended to end the festivities at Esta Noche on 16th St.

This Latin gay club had been in that once-seedy neighborhood for more than 20 years. Now it’s gone. The neighborhood became hip, and the new neighbors are not the kind to patronize Latin drag shows, but Esta Noche was welcoming and lively. 

But I’ve seen more than a few very memorable moments at Esta Noche during my San Francisco days: it was there that Ken MacDonald was kissed in the bathroom by the most handsome man within miles–a high compliment—this is San Francisco after all. It was there—at the bar, not the bathroom—that Miguel Pou taught me to distinguish between the popular music of Spain, and Mexico, Central America plus Colombia and Argentina and a few other countries in the Southern Hemisphere. I usually can pick up that distinctive Brazilian samba-like beat, and of course the lyrics are in a different language though that is not easy to distinguish when you know only a few words in Spanish and Portuguese, fiesta, siesta, libertad, y “Et tu mama tambien”—just because I saw the movie and loved it.

But it was “Lulu” who introduced me to Monica Naranjo. Lulu was definitely not a gorgeous drag queen (by design), but she was one hell of a performer and knew her divas. During her show, I heard this voice that felt like a combination of Madonna, Bette Midler and Janis Joplin, with a touch of Maria Callas. “Who’s that?” I asked the bartender. “Monica,” he said, “THE star of gay Madrid.” I have since learned that she is much more than that. Monica moved to Miami so now I won’t be able to hear her live though I still plan a Madrid expedition soon. I’ve socked away enough dinero.

OK, OK, here is her iconic Sobrevivire. Sometimes her staging and orchestration is a bit cheesy but listen to the quality and strength of that voice! Music unleashes the animal!

I am planning that trip to Spain and hope to hear some great music. Monica is still performing but this year only in Mexico. Hope to find some other great Spanish divas!

I’m on the lookout! Suggestions?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xErS7G3-tCQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYvqf2ws_cU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1Oc3oZv_QA

TV advertising and the “Truth”

 Originally posted December 11th, 2011

From my friend, Ken MacDonald, a wonderful musician and zennist in Canada (it’s not America but an economic superpower, so it counts).

In Canada they are airing a Brita TV ad. On screen there is a drinking glass on the counter which the camera fixes on the whole time. We see what we assume to be a bathroom door in the background. We hear the toilet flush and at the same time we see the water in the glass ‘flushing’ down and refilling. A woman then comes out to drink her water out of the ‘flushed’ glass (and by the way she didn't wash her hands, which is certainly more of a health hazard than drinking municipal water), visually indicating, you get it, that she’s drinking out of the toilet. If we didn’t get it, the voiceover says, ‘Water from the tap and the toilet come from the same source’.

The ad's been altered twice since its first airing. The first time (as noted in the letters between various water and health agency people, and Brita) was to put a legal caveat on the ad to indicate that municipal water has been treated to make it safe for drinking. Then, recently, they added a four-second insert at the end of the ad visually demonstrating a Brita filter change, while the voice-over tells us for best results to change the filter regularly.

The copy reads:

BRITA.

It’s Tasteless!

Nearly 40% of the developing world’s population lacks clean drinking water and about 2 million die each year because of it.1 By 2025 nearly ⅔ will live in water-stressed countries.2

In the developed world we take our supply for granted, flushing it away mindlessly. But BRITA’s latest ads seem to imply that since the water we use for all our purposes “comes from the same source,” it’s as if we are drinking sewer water. Do you think that’s tasteless?

But if you do buy a BRITA filter, don’t expect it to protect you from anything…it doesn’t filter bacteria,

Notes

1 World Health Organization.

2 Morris BL, Lawrence ARL, Chilton PJC, Adams B, Calow RC, Klinck BA. Groundwater and its susceptibility to degradation: a global assessment of the problem and options for management. Nairobi: United Nations Environmental Programme, 2003

This Culture Jamming ad is the opinion of the author. Brita is a trademark of Clorox Corp.

What’s really at stake here is that we have a limited amount of potable water on the planet. Pretty soon we’ll all be buying water. What will we do with all those damn plastic bottles?

Yes, we still need to clean up the bullshit of political advertising. But how will we do that drinking vodka instead of water (and NO, that is not a solution even if it looks like the only way out).

Music, Genius & Surprise

Music, Genius & Surprise

December 2nd, 2007

I wanted to show the Garapons that we have some culture in San Francisco with a trip to Davies Hall and a concert by the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas. MTT never disappoints. When we bought the tickets, I found out that MTT was not on the podium. Disappointment.

Let’s go anyway. Wednesday was the only night Jean and Marie-Christine had for un spectacle musical!

As we sat down, I began to read the program; by the time the musicians had taken their places, I knew that we had really lucked out.

There are some moments in life that astonish, that knock your socks off. This was one. With music, somehow, it seems that your body can respond if properly tuned, even if words fail. You just sit, stirrings arise from deep inside, and then sometimes are followed by a completely different set of feelings. It is like a journey. Then the last cords sound, and there is applause. The culture tells the body to respond. The emotions choose the decibel level.

I have often wondered what it must have been like to hear young Mozart play. Despite the fact that he was promoted by his father as a kind of musical sideshow to make lots of money, not much different from the parents of any child actors today in Hollywood, or some very famous personalities from the more recent past, such Judy Garland whose experience was not entirely happy, I still have impression that Mozart loved music. A person could not compose Don Giovanni or the Magic Flute under duress or carrying mental scares.

No question that he was a genius born into the world with such extraordinary gifts that you might think that they come from the angels. And still he had to have some kind of training.

Listening to the remarkable Lise de la Salle play Rachmaninoff’s 2^nd Piano Concerto, questions like these flooded my mind, that is after the last astonishing bars had faded. She was born in 1988, began playing at 4, was at the Paris Conservatory by age eleven, and to my ear, at age 19 has the grace and command of an Arthur Rubinstein at the end of his career. Clearly she is a musical genius of the highest order, and it is also clear that she loves the piano. Here is a link to the program notes about Lise.

And what a performance it was. To give a hint of her command of the powerful Russian feeling, the emotions of those opening lines, I found a short video of Mme de la Salle playing the amazing Toccata in D minor Op.11 of Prokofiev.

A spectacular evening. Applause please!

Toute la Mémoire du Monde

Toute la Mémoire du Monde pics

California disasters--earthquakes, fires, and technology

California disasters--earthquakes, fires, and technology

december 1st., 2007

Why would any sane person want to live in as unstable a place where the ground shakes and fires rage?

In California our natural disasters are of mammoth proportions and part of the flow of life. Everyone knows about 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. It was the largest natural disaster in US history in terms of material loss and the destruction of what we humans construct, only recently surpassed by hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans.

When my friends Jean and Marie-Christine Garapon flew into the firestorms that began burning across Southern California at the end of October 2007, more than a half a million people were evacuated, the largest forced evacuation in California history. I know several people who were living out of their cars in parking lots of relatively safe areas while the fire crews fought blazes that had been deliberately set. Another friend, a professional mental health worker, helped take care of a man in a locked facility who set blazes in the southern California hills, and got off on watching his fires rage while he masturbated. The human species includes aberrant behavior, and that is not going to change any time soon.

San Francisco Bay, originally uploaded by arawak812.

Here is the San Francisco Bay as seen from the top of Mt. Tamalpais. You can see the city at the end of the peninsula center right. The reason that people want to live here--and pay an enormous amount of money to do it--is the absolutely astonishing beauty of the place. The San Andres fault lies a few miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge, usually in the fog. What lies hidden is the most dangerous.


Jean, Marie-Christine and I rolled across the Golden Gate Bridge to the northern vista point, but we were tourists, and the fog rolled in. Grâce à Google, here is the north tower of the Bridge that we almost saw.




We saw the top of the tower from time to time. Maire-Christine kept trying to time a shot to get as much as she could on her camera. Put together, they might form a somewhat complete view.

QM2 @ GGB, originally uploaded by Sutanto

This picture of the underside of the Bridge was taken from Ft. Point on the San Francisco side, without fog and with the QE 2. When finished in 1937, our bridge was a marvel, by far the longest suspension span in the United States. In the opinion of most San Franciscans, it is still the most beautiful suspension bridge in the world.

Just after Jean and Marie-Christine left, there was another man-made disaster, an oil spill that polluted the bay from one of the hundreds on cargo ships that sail under the bay each year. It is a far less pretty sight than the QE 2.

Cosco Busan (detail), originally uploaded by lens flare.

This is the gash in the Cosco Busan from which 58,000 gallons (almost 220,000 litres) of oil spilled into the San Francisco Bay.

San Franciscans know Greek tragedy, and public outcry. The senior senator from California, our former mayor Diane Feinstein, came roaring into town demanding explanations, brandishing the firebrand of blame. People were fired, the current mayor was criticized for taking a three day Hawaiian girl friend holiday while the slick spread unchecked, the press couldn’t understand why the Coast Guard couldn’t gauge the size of the disaster for 12 hours, the public asked why their offer to help wash the oil from dying birds was rebuffed. All good questions that we’ll ask over and over since human error is not going to disappear and we will continue to insist on living here.

But it was an accident. There are, I suppose, philosophical questions about whether we have stretched our capacity for oversight and control beyond our abilities to live in an ethical and sustainable way. But for the moment, we’ll just clean the shores as best we can, wash as many birds as we can, and nail the persons responsible for the cost of clean up. Then can get back to our lives of enjoying the wonders of California.

Marie-Christine emailed me after our visit: “Was there an oil spill on the bay after we left?” I too can hardly believe how recklessly we treat the earth.

Next I will answer the burning question: what makes San Francisco a place that the French would love!

Why do the French Love San Francisco?

The Eiffel Tower under construction in 1878.

The Golden Gate under construction in 1934-5

After the destruction of City Hall in 1906, the city rebuilt in the beaux art style that certainly Parisians can appreciate.

Starbucks & the First Amendment

In honor of my deeply felt hesitation over a no-brainer. *

I wrote this 11 years ago when I was living in Mountain View. But I feel even more strongly today about the issue, so I'm reposting it.

My local Starbucks is a small shop in a suburban mall. For those with a few minutes to sit and sip their coffee, there are only 15 seats. I love to sit and read. 

But a few months ago, the same three people always seemed to arrive just before I got there, and, in very insistent, self-assured voices, took up the letters of St. Paul: here’s what the Greek really says in this passage of his letter to the Romans; what is justification by faith alone; what was with those women in Ephesus? The three became four, and then five. They took my favorite chair in the corner, and sectioned off the whole comfortable corner for their dialectic. The noise level of their conversation rose as they read, translated, discussed, or even, G_d forbid, sometimes voiced a slight objection. And they did all this with one frothy latte.

At the time, ironically, I was rereading one of my college professor’s books on religious culture in the first century of the Common Era, First Century Judaism in Crisis by Jacob Neusner. He introduced me to the towering figure of Yohanan ben Zakkai, and the flowering of rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the second Temple. This was a great place to get another perspective on Paul, or Rabbi Saul. And as it turns out, the latest unpacking of Paul's letters, reveals a rather unyielding portrait of the apostle who had a nasty rivalry with the disciples who knew the Jesus who lived and preached his gospel, the Paul who pulled the message of Jesus out of the confines of the Temple in Jerusalem and introduced it to a far-flung audience in the Greco-Roman world, perhaps even setting up his soap box in the coffee houses of Corinth and Rome!

After about a month of trying to be as tolerant as I could of Paul’s disciples, responding politely to their overtures and kind hellos, pondering the extent of the First Amendment, I had had enough. I asked for the manager and complained. She said that it was a very difficult and sensitive situation but that I was not alone and she would see what could be done. (Nothing was done, but that is another issue. I am not the only chicken).

I could have just stayed away. I could have just cut short my malicious thoughts about the evangelical highjacking of the Jesus record. I could have stopped my inner commentary about the idiocy of their suppositions. I might not have been vocal to almost everyone about the inappropriate use of a coffee shop - what are church halls for anyway? – when out of the offenders’ ear shot. But I did not. I just complained, not quite anonymously, but quietly when their backs were turned. 

Perhaps just this post is again some confirmation of my guilt at having breached someone’s First Amendment rights. 

Nah, I don’t need too hard on myself. They may have the right to speak, but I have the right not to be forced to listen.

Re-examiination time -- again

Among today's version of the Republican Party, there is not much support for any of the programs that helped the United States, particularly after the end of the Second World War, become the world's economic super power. These include FDR's New Deal which was in place but became a stable part of American life when there was enough money to fund its programs; Medicare and Medical, without which I would be dead; student tuition programs like the GI bill that gave us the largest well educated work force in history; and more particularly the huge infusion of money into infrastructure, e.g. the huge interstate highways system that Ike sold as essential for national defense.

Republican attacks on the bailout rely on an underclass handout image for these programs. Wall Street tycoons are the new welfare mothers in Cadillac’s. I liked this article because it helped me see that the way I personally view both the programs themselves and the way that we view them as skewed.

Read it. I think Mr. Wolff has a point, or even several!

Does Welfare Work? If social welfare programs work, then countries with more extensive programs should report a smaller percent of their population living in poverty. And that is exactly what we find. According to UNICEF, the percentage of children living in poverty in 2005 was: Denmark, 2.4%; France, 7.5%, Norway, 13.4%; Canada, 14.9%; United Kingdom, 15.4%; United States, 21.9%. (Thank goodness for Mexico — 27.7%.) The Human Development Index (HDI) measures general well-being, with special emphasis on child welfare. Ratings released in 2009, covering the period up to 2007, reveal the following: the U.S. ranks 13th, in a virtual tie with Austria, Spain, and Denmark, surpassed by some countries noted for extensive welfare programs: Norway, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, and Finland.

Hey Harry, your sentences are a total mess!

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada said in ”remarks prepared for delivery” to note the passing Senator Edward Kennedy:

"The impact he etched into our history will long endure. The liberal lion's mighty roar may now fall on deaf ears, but his dream shall never die."

 

Hey Harry, these sentences are a total mess! I think I am beginning to see why health care reform is getting so jumbled in the Senate debate. You guys can’t think straight.

I hate to be a nitpicker—no that’s a lie—I enjoy it more than you can imagine. I have a pet theory, hatched in the Geo W Bush years: totally mashed up semantics, weird modifiers and misdirected metaphors that paint a dreadful picture reflect mashed up, weird, misdirected and dreadful thinking. QED.

Here we go. Not to leave poor Geo way ahead in the war of malapropisms, the Democrats, with Harry at bat, have scored some whopping points!

"The impact he etched into our history will long endure.” Harry gets off to a slow start. Though “etching an impact” is a bit hard for me to get visually, “to etch in memory” is a common way to say “unforgettable.” Etching is a process in the visual arts that requires the application of acid, mordant or abrasive of some sort to the unprotected areas on a metal to create the negative of an image for reproduction. Doesn’t he just mean that it will be hard to forget Teddy and that his legacy will be equally hard to erase. The use of the word “history” might be trying to sound the sad note that Teddy is no longer with us, but his body is barely cold. But I will give “etched impact” 4 points, but take 2 away for the introduction of Teddy’s death with an weak nuance for “history”–if that is even his meaning.

“The liberal lion's mighty roar may now fall on deaf ears, but his dream shall never die." But here’s where the real fun begins, and Harry racks up real points. These are two great images, the roaring lion and the “I have a dream” rhetoric of any visionary. But in the same sentence? Both images are diminished plus it makes no sense. Minus 10 points for each infraction. The middle phrase, “deaf ears,” must mean that the Republicans in the Senate, those in power, those in the opposition, are so stupid that they cannot hear or understand his strong cogent, articulate arguments. But did this just happen now that Teddy is dead—now that he is no longer around to twist arms in the Senate cloakroom? Hardly. They were deaf long before. So I am going to deduct 40 points for nonsense. I have also heard that one can dream with all the organs, but the ears are not usually regarded as the instrument of dreams in ordinary speech, but then again, people who dream do hear voices, usually ominous warnings of danger. But if this is the meaning, it is very obtuse. I will deduct another 30 points. That leaves Harry with a score of 8 out of a possible 100. George scored 0 on multiple occasions. Keep it up Harry, you can still give him a run for his money.

Political Cartoon by Michael Ramirez

"Give up. The War is lost!"