A Beautiful Movement to Spread Music to All Children

Mayakovsky at the Museum of Photographic Arts

Look who I found at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego.  Seeing Maya at the museum was a funny surprise.  I wish I had taken a better picture though.

Tijuana's art and music scene in the news

TIJUANA — On a recent Friday night along Avenida Revolución, dense crowds of club kids, college students and stylishly dressed maquiladora workers wandered past boisterous new bars, nouvelle restaurants, mod clothing shops and funky art galleries.

Nearby on Callejon de la Sexta (also known as Sixth Street), which not long ago was a wasteland of empty, sinister-looking storefronts, leather- and denim-swathed thirtysomethings spilled onto the sidewalk in front of La Mezcalera, a bar decked out like a cross between a Oaxacan bodega and a Chinese bordello that serves dozens of varieties of mescal.

Open Veins

Pura López Colomé

Thurston Moore's new band, Chelsea Light Moving, referencing O'Hara and Burroughs.  I read recently some of their new material includes verses by John Donne.

Spring time and all

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds new album is on heavy rotation.  Seems a little short, but maybe it's because I want it to continue.

I'm also happy to share that I just finished Luivette Resto's Ascension, recently published by Tia Chucha Press.  The poems both sizzle and lure the reader toward quiet, and often times, not-so-quiet contemplation, as one tightens fists, laughs, or retreats toward the back room of solitude.  Among my favorites in this dynamic collection are "Unapologetic," "Sonnet for Our Lexicon," "Confessions of a Love Poem," "The Pendeja Syndrome," and the 5 page "Letters to a Young Latina Poet."  Luivette is a great reader of her work, and if she's ever at a venue near you, be sure to stop by. 

Sheryl Luna's Seven was just released by 3: A Taos Press.  Sheryl's previous collection, Pity the Drowned Horses, is phenomenal, a book I return to often. I can't wait to get my hands on her new one.

In today's LA Times, an article by Reed Johnson discusses LACMA's 'Asco' show at Mexico City museum.  Check out cool goods at Harry Gamboa's blog.

I've still been listening to Youth Lagoon's latest.  Damn, I wish I wrote this...

and this...

We all love Nicanor Parra. He’s now 94 years old and a resounding consensus as to the nature of his writing is growing. This is good news. Parra is one of the greatest living poets and his work is not poetry but antipoesía: a sustained attempt to debunk what we understand as poetry. Antipoetry interprets something never before expressed regarding our life and world, something that profoundly bounds poetry to life. That’s the way it is, and yet, there’s something disturbing, something that doesn’t quite fit together. I am referring to a Gordian knot underlying his antipoetry that obstinately opposes institutionalization. Skeptics attribute a premature rigor mortis to Parra’s project, deeming it impossible to fully acknowledge antipoetry’s implicit subversion and demolishing force without first turning it into a stuffed animal. This is the exaltation and burial: on the one hand, readers admire antipoetry. On the other, they deny it by converting the most revolutionary vision of poetry in Spanish of our time into something neither more nor less acceptable than what could be the inopportune laugh of a student during mass. If it were just this, there’d be no problem, except for the fact that the church that this student goes to is horrifying. This student is a victim of sexual abuse and for some time now we’ve known that mass is a bloody ritual. Antipoetry shows us this brutal scenario.