From Tinfoil Trapeze (Trapecio de Papel Aluminio) By Buendía Shane, Bogota, Picatori Press, 19861
1 Mr. Shane, like many Colombians of his generation, was heavily inspired by Andres Caicedo's Que Viva La Música. While Tinfoil is not on the whole succesful, I can't for the life of me figure out why Música remains untranslated. It's a kickass novel.
However, since Caicedo's novel will no doubt eventually be Englished and Shane's will most likely not, I thought I'd give you a taste of it. Like Caicedo's, it's about drinking, dancing, screwing, and obsessing over music.
2 In the original, the broken phrases are meant to suggest gringo-ized Spanish. They are about successful there as they are in here, meaning not at all. Why people think accents are funny is beyond me.
3 Naranja Postobón in the original: the Colombian orange soda of choice to chase aguardiente.
"Is Otis Redding the better singer, for even when he sings the sad songs he sounds happy."
"No. Is Sam Cooke, for when he sings the happy songs he sounds sad." 2
We overheard and did not join in. I wanted to join in. I wanted to let them know that I knew the people they discussed. I realized that my knowing the two soul singers formed my only real interest in the discussion, and that I had no opinion one way or the other. Sam Cooke. Otis Redding. In this stained-glassed dive in the centro. To hear the Americans talk of them in the brief silence between a Cuban son and a Colombianized rocksteady made sense. Otis and Sam had found a temporary home.
Their Spanish improved with beer. Their dancing did not.
I drank a shot of aguardiente chased by orange soda3, then danced with Marcela. When we got home I played a tape of Redding singing Cooke's Chain Gang. I don't know why I thought I'd see the Americans again.
1 Mr. Shane, like many Colombians of his generation, was heavily inspired by Andres Caicedo's Que Viva La Música. While Tinfoil is not on the whole succesful, I can't for the life of me figure out why Música remains untranslated. It's a kickass novel.
However, since Caicedo's novel will no doubt eventually be Englished and Shane's will most likely not, I thought I'd give you a taste of it. Like Caicedo's, it's about drinking, dancing, screwing, and obsessing over music.
2 In the original, the broken phrases are meant to suggest gringo-ized Spanish. They are about successful there as they are in here, meaning not at all. Why people think accents are funny is beyond me.
3 Naranja Postobón in the original: the Colombian orange soda of choice to chase aguardiente.
Excerpt
Yesterday, the neighbors painted the walls red. Today they painted the kitchen tile red, the living room rug, the appliances -- fridge, microwave, stove, stove-top, all red -- the ceiling, and the knickknacks: Hummel figurines, Star Trek collectible plates, posters of Anna Nicole Smith, Britney Spears, and James Dean at the Hopper diner. All red. They opened their windows to aerate.
Justiniano walked from school to his apartment to find the open window, the red room, and the two men in their black red-speckled suits standing with their brushes looking in his direction. They had lived opposite him forever. They never said anything.
They had never done anything odd until now. And Justiniano could see, arrested in his passage from the covered patio with its defeated plantain tree to his small apartment with Digimon already on, that there was nothing particularly odd about the act itself -- his parents had painted his room a cheery, muted yellow last year. And if they said nothing to him, he had not made any great efforts to say anything to them as well. He said little. He probably talked less than the men with the dark suits and red-tipped brushes.
Itemized and Annotated
1 This is the best jerky in the world.
2 Recipe here.
3 Eaten very sparely these days as it is a caloric bomb.
4 See Joel Achenbach's essay on Pepperidge Farms in Why Things Are, on why consuming PF products can be made into a disquieting funhouse experience.
5 100% Colombian. Of course.
6 For item above
7 But no, not a Mormon.
8 See Kafka.
+ And all this as a way to remark on how delightful routine can be -- on how eating the same thing every week (excepting 2, 3, 12, and 15, which are only consumed on special ocassions, and salad-cut hearts of palm, consumed when the mood strikes), and how one can truly revel in quality products manufactured in countless numbers by massive corporations. (Or conglomerates? Note that the bread and the soup come from the same source, as probably do a few other products.) Note, too, that every page of my memo pad holds a permutation of this list: need more of this, ran out of that. And we can't say goodbye w/o remarking that this, right here, is what we all dreaded -- minutae compiled from the sidelines of everyone's routine. Sorry! And yes, there are far less trivial sidelines, not to mention far more entertaining food-related material.
- Jerky1
- Carrabba's Chicken Bryan2
- General Tso's Chicken3
- Pepperidge Farms Bread4
- Campbell's Ready-to-Consume Plastic Jar of Tomato Soup.
- Folger's Whole Bean Coffee5
- Stir-Fry Chicken and Beef
- Olive oil & Carlic6
- Publix-brand Lite Yogurt
- Publix-brand caffeine-free diet soda. 7
- Imitation Crab Meat
- Chocolatinas Jet
- Green mangos with salt.
- Boars Head hams and cheeses
- Ark Clams
- Bananas
-
Nutella8
1 This is the best jerky in the world.
2 Recipe here.
3 Eaten very sparely these days as it is a caloric bomb.
4 See Joel Achenbach's essay on Pepperidge Farms in Why Things Are, on why consuming PF products can be made into a disquieting funhouse experience.
5 100% Colombian. Of course.
6 For item above
7 But no, not a Mormon.
8 See Kafka.
+ And all this as a way to remark on how delightful routine can be -- on how eating the same thing every week (excepting 2, 3, 12, and 15, which are only consumed on special ocassions, and salad-cut hearts of palm, consumed when the mood strikes), and how one can truly revel in quality products manufactured in countless numbers by massive corporations. (Or conglomerates? Note that the bread and the soup come from the same source, as probably do a few other products.) Note, too, that every page of my memo pad holds a permutation of this list: need more of this, ran out of that. And we can't say goodbye w/o remarking that this, right here, is what we all dreaded -- minutae compiled from the sidelines of everyone's routine. Sorry! And yes, there are far less trivial sidelines, not to mention far more entertaining food-related material.
Love for Sale Unlinked
Once my cousin started we could not get him to stop. We asked him, but he would only say, "I'm just a poor boy. Yeah, baby. You think I'm dead, but I sail away. The train keeps on movin'. The king of Marigold was in the kitchen. Johnny's in the basement. I'm all shook up. Blame it on Cain. Who do you trust, the little spider or me? Thank you for the days. How very."
And so on.
He could quote at length and at random for hours. Like the poor fellow in that Undeclared episode or the people who use Monty Python chestnuts as a shield from normal interaction with human beings -- when the mood struck him he'd string these half-sensical monologues out of other people's work. (David Byrne attempted to write a full song out of advertising slogans, but failed. My cousin succeeded by not concerning himself overly with sense or sensibility. He would just string the words along.) But then he'd step outside and talk with people other than his cousins and be perfectly normal. I don't know. I suppose it was our thing, an family in-joke that most of the family was not in on.
Once my cousin started we could not get him to stop. We asked him, but he would only say, "I'm just a poor boy. Yeah, baby. You think I'm dead, but I sail away. The train keeps on movin'. The king of Marigold was in the kitchen. Johnny's in the basement. I'm all shook up. Blame it on Cain. Who do you trust, the little spider or me? Thank you for the days. How very."
And so on.
He could quote at length and at random for hours. Like the poor fellow in that Undeclared episode or the people who use Monty Python chestnuts as a shield from normal interaction with human beings -- when the mood struck him he'd string these half-sensical monologues out of other people's work. (David Byrne attempted to write a full song out of advertising slogans, but failed. My cousin succeeded by not concerning himself overly with sense or sensibility. He would just string the words along.) But then he'd step outside and talk with people other than his cousins and be perfectly normal. I don't know. I suppose it was our thing, an family in-joke that most of the family was not in on.
Bombay Quiz
Flying across the desert in a TWA I saw a woman walk across the sand. She carried a navy backpack, bottled water strapped to the side on black mesh, a fat paperback in her hands: the orange spine suggested Penguin. I thought of Capote’s “Mojave.” I thought of desert dwellers and their perils.
It did not occur to me, until after landing, that we must have been flying far too low. Else how did I spot this apparition? Nor did I wonder why she was there. I suspected she was there for the simple animal joy of movement – we move: we exercise: we jog and lift weights and do push-ups and TaeBo and walk across abandoned territories because how can you not.
How can you not put your body to use?
I don’t drive. I walk. Listen: I’ve been walking up and down Orlando since 1996, and not once have I had a bird shit on me. What are the odds? And I have not had a fall or endured any real discomfort – no sprains or breakages – in forever, years and years and years. Yes, knock on wood.
And also there’s this: I’ll be fixing a roast beef sandwich when I get home and when I’ll bite into it I’ll feel like the panther at the end of “The Hunger Artist.” And this: why do we wake up with this ball of unalloyed joy bouncing close by? Why is it following us? And why do we know it's OK?
Flying across the desert in a TWA I saw a woman walk across the sand. She carried a navy backpack, bottled water strapped to the side on black mesh, a fat paperback in her hands: the orange spine suggested Penguin. I thought of Capote’s “Mojave.” I thought of desert dwellers and their perils.
It did not occur to me, until after landing, that we must have been flying far too low. Else how did I spot this apparition? Nor did I wonder why she was there. I suspected she was there for the simple animal joy of movement – we move: we exercise: we jog and lift weights and do push-ups and TaeBo and walk across abandoned territories because how can you not.
How can you not put your body to use?
I don’t drive. I walk. Listen: I’ve been walking up and down Orlando since 1996, and not once have I had a bird shit on me. What are the odds? And I have not had a fall or endured any real discomfort – no sprains or breakages – in forever, years and years and years. Yes, knock on wood.
And also there’s this: I’ll be fixing a roast beef sandwich when I get home and when I’ll bite into it I’ll feel like the panther at the end of “The Hunger Artist.” And this: why do we wake up with this ball of unalloyed joy bouncing close by? Why is it following us? And why do we know it's OK?
Radura
"Art requires the precision of science, science the enthusiasm of art."
So read the signature file of a stranger. It sounded familiar. I did not know why he had e-mailed me, or why he had chosen to talk to me about the lamentable lapses of the Internet Movie Database, which fails to note the remarkable contributions of Andrea Botkin (no relation to Christy) to independent cinema on both coasts.
She worked on the sidelines, mostly as a grip or as a catchall assistant, often for little or no money. But her enthusiasm proved invaluable in productions where money ran short, including the infamous La Bete.
The e-mail alleges that she worked with Mike Jittlov on his opus, Wizard of Speed and Time. Jittlov, like many mavericks, worked towards a singular vision, and the singularity of that vision outweighed all else. He has found fans in people whose visions have likewise gone against the grain.
MST3K, another unconventional success story, lasted longer than anyone could have anticipated. That they continue to work together in various projects is heartening.
Andrea Botkin worked with a lot of people, but never for very long. She wasn't very good with money. She never earned much. She worked as a substitute teacher, a job she liked because it afforded her time to help out with movies.
She knew the technical side of filmmaking inside and out. Without that knowledge there would have been no art.
The gap between dazzling competence and equally dazzling incompetence seems uncrossable. It parallels the uncrossable divide between true art and the banal, the crass derivative, the lumpen misfire.
"Art requires the precision of science, science the enthusiasm of art."
So read the signature file of a stranger. It sounded familiar. I did not know why he had e-mailed me, or why he had chosen to talk to me about the lamentable lapses of the Internet Movie Database, which fails to note the remarkable contributions of Andrea Botkin (no relation to Christy) to independent cinema on both coasts.
She worked on the sidelines, mostly as a grip or as a catchall assistant, often for little or no money. But her enthusiasm proved invaluable in productions where money ran short, including the infamous La Bete.
The e-mail alleges that she worked with Mike Jittlov on his opus, Wizard of Speed and Time. Jittlov, like many mavericks, worked towards a singular vision, and the singularity of that vision outweighed all else. He has found fans in people whose visions have likewise gone against the grain.
MST3K, another unconventional success story, lasted longer than anyone could have anticipated. That they continue to work together in various projects is heartening.
Andrea Botkin worked with a lot of people, but never for very long. She wasn't very good with money. She never earned much. She worked as a substitute teacher, a job she liked because it afforded her time to help out with movies.
She knew the technical side of filmmaking inside and out. Without that knowledge there would have been no art.
The gap between dazzling competence and equally dazzling incompetence seems uncrossable. It parallels the uncrossable divide between true art and the banal, the crass derivative, the lumpen misfire.
Cha Cha Cha
Without the alterna-wave of the mid-nineties there would have been no Aterciopelados, and arguably no Shakira. Before 1994, Colombia's rock-en-español scene had been under the influence of Iron Maiden or The Cure. Death- and Thrash-metal or mope-synths. Nothing else. And the latter had been filtered through Argentina – via Soda Stereo.
Grunge changed everything in Bogotá. The first fuzzy indicator arrived in the form of the Argentineans, whose "De Musica Ligera" echoed chord for chord "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Soon Bogotá bands whose sets sounded vaguely Smiths-ish or unapologetically Slayer-ish now absorbed The Pixies by the pound, and Sonic Youth, and of course Nirvana.
For every band that made it – made it modestly (1280 Almas, La Derecha, Estados Alterados, and the kickass folks from Bloque) or big (Aterciopelados, Shakira, Ekhymosis and its lead singer's Grammy-winning solo venture: Juanes, and Carlos Vives) – there were a hundred that did not come close to making it. Petrarquía played five gigs in the Zona Rosa's Kalimán before vanishing altogether.
The name they had kept from when they played heavy metal, but by 1996 they had absorbed a lot of Ween and Talking Heads. What Petrarquía poured out owed much to the Heads, and to David Byrne's latin-influenced solo albums, specially Rei Momo.
The band played Colombianized songs tinged with the Latin flourishes of American rock acts. They added the metronomic congas and sterile trumpets that American musicians turned to when they wanted the "Latin sound." The band loved that sound. They loved it, though most every other Colombian rejected it – rejected it as one rejects the sound of one's own voice when played back on a tape recorder. That's not us. That's not Latin music.
It wasn't. And when Petrarquía played it back, it wasn't even Colombianized American Latin music. They sounded like a cabaret act from deep in Minnesota whose only exposure to Latin music had been the Chiquita Banana theme song. It was glorious.
They played for the last time late in 2001. I wasn't there. They played a small club – they didn't do a single one of their own songs. All covers. A friend e-mailed me the set list.
They played a couple of songs from Rei Momo, and Carole King's "Corazon," and five (!) from Kirsty MacColl's Tropical Brainstorm, Ann Magnuson's "Sex With the Devil," Nelson Riddle's Shelly Winters Cha Cha Cha, "Isla del Encanto" by the Pixies and "Isla Bonita" by Madonna, "Buenas Tardes Amigo" by Ween.
They said goodnight and don't plan on playing again. My friend said that the club wasn't full but that the people that were there were very enthusiastic, and that hardly anybody was drinking.
Without the alterna-wave of the mid-nineties there would have been no Aterciopelados, and arguably no Shakira. Before 1994, Colombia's rock-en-español scene had been under the influence of Iron Maiden or The Cure. Death- and Thrash-metal or mope-synths. Nothing else. And the latter had been filtered through Argentina – via Soda Stereo.
Grunge changed everything in Bogotá. The first fuzzy indicator arrived in the form of the Argentineans, whose "De Musica Ligera" echoed chord for chord "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Soon Bogotá bands whose sets sounded vaguely Smiths-ish or unapologetically Slayer-ish now absorbed The Pixies by the pound, and Sonic Youth, and of course Nirvana.
For every band that made it – made it modestly (1280 Almas, La Derecha, Estados Alterados, and the kickass folks from Bloque) or big (Aterciopelados, Shakira, Ekhymosis and its lead singer's Grammy-winning solo venture: Juanes, and Carlos Vives) – there were a hundred that did not come close to making it. Petrarquía played five gigs in the Zona Rosa's Kalimán before vanishing altogether.
The name they had kept from when they played heavy metal, but by 1996 they had absorbed a lot of Ween and Talking Heads. What Petrarquía poured out owed much to the Heads, and to David Byrne's latin-influenced solo albums, specially Rei Momo.
The band played Colombianized songs tinged with the Latin flourishes of American rock acts. They added the metronomic congas and sterile trumpets that American musicians turned to when they wanted the "Latin sound." The band loved that sound. They loved it, though most every other Colombian rejected it – rejected it as one rejects the sound of one's own voice when played back on a tape recorder. That's not us. That's not Latin music.
It wasn't. And when Petrarquía played it back, it wasn't even Colombianized American Latin music. They sounded like a cabaret act from deep in Minnesota whose only exposure to Latin music had been the Chiquita Banana theme song. It was glorious.
They played for the last time late in 2001. I wasn't there. They played a small club – they didn't do a single one of their own songs. All covers. A friend e-mailed me the set list.
They played a couple of songs from Rei Momo, and Carole King's "Corazon," and five (!) from Kirsty MacColl's Tropical Brainstorm, Ann Magnuson's "Sex With the Devil," Nelson Riddle's Shelly Winters Cha Cha Cha, "Isla del Encanto" by the Pixies and "Isla Bonita" by Madonna, "Buenas Tardes Amigo" by Ween.
They said goodnight and don't plan on playing again. My friend said that the club wasn't full but that the people that were there were very enthusiastic, and that hardly anybody was drinking.
Roam Thither, Then.
Decline is inevitable. Emilio Fulano's three novels, when placed on an imaginary Cartesian graph where x marks Time and y marks Quality, depict a pathetically small triangular pattern:
A careless reader will connect the three dots with straight lines. The careful reader will trace a parabola through its directrix to its humble vertex and down again. Is it surprising that the first thing to come to mind is not a molehill but a frown?
Others fared much better. They hardly wrote a dud, and kept their love of puns alive from their earliest efforts all the way through. Emilio loved language games not wisely, but he loved them well.
Decline is inevitable. Emilio Fulano's three novels, when placed on an imaginary Cartesian graph where x marks Time and y marks Quality, depict a pathetically small triangular pattern:
The first novel was a wild but hermetic fantasia based in part on a Kipling book from which others have also drawn inspiration. Emiliano built his amusements like others built parks -- and like all parks Emiliano's were cursed with misfortune and haunted by the strange and the unsavory. The second novel suceeded in its own small way. Reviewers compared it favorably to Avram Davison's best. It proved an unfortunately accurate comparison. Like with Davidson, Emilio's readers were enthusiastic but few. Emilio released his third novel when he was in his sixties. Poor, and in poor health, he died four days after the novel was released. All but a few copies remain. It is not an undiscovered classic: the novel reads much like everything Exley wrote after A Fan's Notes. Emilio chased after the ghost of his great achievement, knowing he could never equal it. He wrote the kind of knotty, unreadable postmodernist prose that Wolfe, among other people, have argued against.
.
. .
A careless reader will connect the three dots with straight lines. The careful reader will trace a parabola through its directrix to its humble vertex and down again. Is it surprising that the first thing to come to mind is not a molehill but a frown?
Others fared much better. They hardly wrote a dud, and kept their love of puns alive from their earliest efforts all the way through. Emilio loved language games not wisely, but he loved them well.
Roduél: Gloriously Impure
The case against retired Chilean filmmaker Roduél never captured the attention of the American media, which had its own film-related business to chew over. Whether or not he was involved in the scandal -- he probably was, although his degree of guilt is unclear -- is of far less importance than his development of game-shows in his country and in Peru and Japan.
The Japanese-Peruvian connection, on the other hand, should strike anyone as yet one more example of the charming mestizaje that defines South America. Few other places are as willing to borrow so many bits from everywhere, everything, and everyone (as the girls from lpanema will attest). There are other places that manage this mingling just as well, of course.
If, as David Foster Wallace pointed out, television is insidious because anything you throw at it is co-opted by the medium, then South America's mestizaje is its less creepy real-life twin: a place where whatever is thrown at it is absorbed, reshaped, reimagined. Music and pop culture go through it, but so does life.
Roduél's work did not dig into the mesh of life – he was too superficial a craftsman. All his films coasted along the surface. But in his less guarded moments, a careful observer could detect a willingness to go deeper. He borrowed freely from Kurasawa's wide open shots. Several of his soap-opera projects for Chilean TV, which I had caught late at night on Colombian's (now defunct) Canal Dos, showed the distinct influence of David Lynch (low bass in otherwise casual settings, deliberately ungraceful movement, incongrous details added to the background of the set) and Cassavetes, of all people. Roduél was not the first to ask his soap-opera stars to improvise, but he was certainly one of the first to do it right, and to use the handheld camera effectively in the context of a South American soap-opera, though in a few episodes the tape marking where the actors should stand is clearly visible. As for Roduél's claims to have watched Polanski's The Tenant once a week for a whole year, I don't know what do with that, considering the sordid parallels one could draw from the latter's sordid infelicity.
He might have gotten his start because of his relationship with Leila Diniz, but the man had talent. He was not the first to be led astray by Hollywood. As for his name, he is not the first one to indulge in this affectation. He has quite a bit of company.
The case against retired Chilean filmmaker Roduél never captured the attention of the American media, which had its own film-related business to chew over. Whether or not he was involved in the scandal -- he probably was, although his degree of guilt is unclear -- is of far less importance than his development of game-shows in his country and in Peru and Japan.
The Japanese-Peruvian connection, on the other hand, should strike anyone as yet one more example of the charming mestizaje that defines South America. Few other places are as willing to borrow so many bits from everywhere, everything, and everyone (as the girls from lpanema will attest). There are other places that manage this mingling just as well, of course.
If, as David Foster Wallace pointed out, television is insidious because anything you throw at it is co-opted by the medium, then South America's mestizaje is its less creepy real-life twin: a place where whatever is thrown at it is absorbed, reshaped, reimagined. Music and pop culture go through it, but so does life.
Roduél's work did not dig into the mesh of life – he was too superficial a craftsman. All his films coasted along the surface. But in his less guarded moments, a careful observer could detect a willingness to go deeper. He borrowed freely from Kurasawa's wide open shots. Several of his soap-opera projects for Chilean TV, which I had caught late at night on Colombian's (now defunct) Canal Dos, showed the distinct influence of David Lynch (low bass in otherwise casual settings, deliberately ungraceful movement, incongrous details added to the background of the set) and Cassavetes, of all people. Roduél was not the first to ask his soap-opera stars to improvise, but he was certainly one of the first to do it right, and to use the handheld camera effectively in the context of a South American soap-opera, though in a few episodes the tape marking where the actors should stand is clearly visible. As for Roduél's claims to have watched Polanski's The Tenant once a week for a whole year, I don't know what do with that, considering the sordid parallels one could draw from the latter's sordid infelicity.
He might have gotten his start because of his relationship with Leila Diniz, but the man had talent. He was not the first to be led astray by Hollywood. As for his name, he is not the first one to indulge in this affectation. He has quite a bit of company.