Second Cardinal Sin of Facial Hairdom -- Dyed Hair with Sideburns

This is another aberration of the 90s that continues to wreak havoc on the faces of those who were teenagers and twenty-somethings in the period when hair dye and sideburns were definitive markers of some sort of subcultural or "alternative" affiliation. At the time, I think, it communicated a general disaffection with normativity without a clear affiliation to anything in particular, excepting enjoyment of the recorded music of Nirvana.



The hideousness of this combination reaches an apex when dudes with dark facial hair choose to maintain their chin-strap or sideburns despite lightning their non-beard hair. Don't do this it makes you look like you have mange! Don't grow facial hair if you plan on bleaching or dying your hair in a shade that is significantly different from the color of your facial hair!

Qualifying Exams List, 1st draft (U.S. Latino Literature)

I am posting this rough draft to aid anyone searching the internet for help constructing exam lists. My advisor has suggested an altogether different trajectory in searching for relevant works which involves finding secondary sources (usually literary criticism) that tries to synthesize various works into an argument about the tradition or moment in which these works are engaged. I've also included a list of "gringo" works which I hope can give an account of the overlapping concerns and contradictions between U.S. Latino literature and that of the "gringos."

My advisor's response knocked the wind out of my sails given the fact that I've been spending the last few months reading historical accounts of the practices of the literature and anthologies that laid the pieces out in schematic detail. He also knocked the pre-1945 works off my list--it is a post-WWII through the present list anyway. Nonetheless, here they are in a rough draft:

Jose Marti. New York Writings (1898).
Azuela, Mariano. The Underdogs (1915).
Mena, Maria Cristina. The Collected Stories of Maria Cristina Mena (1931).
Perez, Luis. El Coyote: The Rebel (1947).
Octavio Paz. The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950).
Paredes, Americo. “With a Pistol in His Hand:” A Border Ballad and its Hero (1958).
Virreal, Jose Antonio. Pocho (1959).
Jesus Colon. A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches (1961).
Luis Valdez. Early Works. (1960s).
John Rechy. City of Night (1963).
Gonzales, Rodolpho “I Am Joaquín” (1967).
Piri Thomas. Down These Mean Streets (1967).
Rivera, Tomas. ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1971).
Pietri, Pedro. “Puerto Rican Obituary” (1973).
Rodolfo Anaya. Bless Me, Ultima (1973).
Acosta, Oscar Zeta. Revolt of the Cockroach People. (1974).
Piñero, Miguel. Short Eyes (1975).
Acosta, Iván. El Super (1982).
Moraga, Cherrie L. Loving in the War Years (1983).
Hinojosa, Rolando. Klail City (1987).
Anzaldua, Gloria. Boderlands / La Frontera (1987).
Hijuelos, Oscar. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989).
Arturo Islas. The Rain God: A Desert Tale (1991).
Arenas, Reinaldo. Antes Que Anochezca (1992).
Cristina Garcia. Dreaming in Cuban (1993).
Abraham Rodriguez Jr. Spidertown (1993).
Alvarez, Julia. In the Time of Butterflies (1994).
Diaz, Junot. Drown (1996).
Martinez, Demetria. Mother Tongue (1997).
Goldman, Francisco. The Ordinary Seaman (1998).
Murray, Yxta Maya. Locas (1998).
Tobar, Hector. The Tattooed Soldier (2000).
Quiñonez, Ernesto. Bodega Dreams (2000).
Vea, Alfreado. Gods Go Begging (2000).
Cisneros, Sandra. Caramelo (2003).
Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory (2004).

Gringo Lit.
Wilder, Thornton. The Bridge of San Luis Rey. (1927).
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby (1925).
William Carlos Williams. In the American Grain (1925).?
Faulkner, William. Light in August (1932).
Dos Passos, John. The Big Money (1936).
Hemmingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).
Mailer, Norman. The Naked and the Dead (1948).
Burroughs, William. The Yage Letters (1952).
Ellison, Ralph. The Invisible Man (1952).
Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. (1953).
Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March (1953).
Kerouac, Jack. Tristessa (1960).
Burroughs, William. Naked Lunch (1962).
Dos Passos, John. Brazil on the Move (1963).
O’Connor, Flannery. “Everything that Rises Must Converge,”
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1965).
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49 (1966).
Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint (1969).
Gaddis, William. JR (1975).
Doctorow, E.L. Ragtime (1975).
O’Brien, Tim. Going After Cacciato (1979).
Auster, Paul. In the Country of Last Things (1987).
McCarthy, Cormac. The Crossing (1995).
Updike, John. Rabbit is Rich (1996).
Delillo, Don. Underworld (1998).
McCarthy, Cormac. Cities of the Plain (1999).

"That Punani Better Make That Money"

Many of you know my immersion in graduate school has left me little time to troll the internet looking for new artists and obscure older ones, leaving me to peruse the occasional R&B/hip hop radio offerings and assorted things handed to me by friends and acquaintances, not to mention my guilty pleasure MTV. And even these diversions I have little time for.

This friday I attended one of the best, and I think my first, hip hop shows with some neighborhood lesbians. The show was a mixed crowd of hip hop fans, African-American and non-African-American lesbians, other assorted gays, and some white indie fans. Yo! Majesty played an amazing set, with some interesting house-styled back-up and gay dancers. Shunda K. did an amazing job with killer, rapid-fire delivery even with the incarceration of the other half of her duo. Their sound reaches inside and outside the confines of hip hop, house, crunk, and punk influences are noted both in the music itself and in album imagery.

This is a live performance of "Booty Clap"



"Kryptonite Pussy"



The success of the show overall was tempered by some of the opening acts which were local, white-folks, weirdo rap outfits, that were at time arduous and self-indulgent.

Flooding a McDonalds

Danish art collective Superflex floods a facsimile of a McDonalds restaurant. The following is a clip from a larger video installation. This is, perhaps, a kind of pranksterish type of work caught up in its own irreverence, as much of contemporary art seems to be. However, I wonder if McDonalds, as the uotidian image of globalization, under inundation presents either an image of neoliberal globalization overwhelmed by the forces of history, or, alternately, undone by the financial crisis.


Flooded McDonald's from Superflex on Vimeo.

Blake by way of Brazil

Thanks to five video based on William Blake's poem, "The Tyger," which many have had to memorize in their youth. This video by artist Guilherme Marcondes sets the poem in a definitively contemporary urban space, making it a meditation scrawled with graffiti and comic book references, on urbanity, emerging resistances, and, perhaps, some image of an implicit "human nature."

Notorious B.U.M.

Arbitrarily searching "related videos" on youtube and discovered this video of a homeless man rapping for $2 in the parking-lot of a fast-food restaurant. I am ambivalent about the video's implicit voyeurism of poverty as a kind of spectacle, and yet it also displays the ways in which struggling people can produce meanings for themselves in the face of the difficulties of survival.



Dignity is a concept concocted of middle class anxieties.

PGH Anti-Discrimination Ordinance, etc.

Over the holiday my family and I engaged in our X-mas tradition of watching incredibly depressing movies because we are not in church or at mass. This year we decided to take on Milk--Gus Van Zant's biopic of the first "out" gay politician in the United States. Whilst I was a little skeptical of the selection of this topic and this figure to give voice to a particular moment in the history of LGBT struggle, not to mention I had heard that Sean Penn performs a "slow" or seemingly "touched" version of this San Francisco council member, I found myself enjoying this movie.

As opposed to Broke Back Mountain, the first mass market film about the loneliness, isolation, and (in this case, muted) violence of closeted, but practicing, queer life for two cowboys, this film attempts to link its protagonist to a movement and a struggle, something Harvey Milk himself was adamant to foreground throughout his career. Van Zant actually does an excellent job of connecting Milk's story to the story of this moment of struggle. Whereas I found myself feeling rather unelated and disconnected from Broke Back (which incidentally produced a slew of pornographic knock-offs based solely on name parallels), I felt "moved" by aspects of this film. Also, unlike Elephant, where Van Zant obliquely implies that the Columbine teen agents of massacre were acting on some repressed homosexual tendencies, Dan White's reasons for killing Milk, along with San Francisco's mayor, are left ambiguous.

Official Trailer Below:


Watching Milk, reminded me of one of Harvey Milk's most powerful nemeses, Anita Bryant. The singer, citus-council spokeswoman, and anti-gay christiano-facist whose legacy is still with us, worked to enable state governments to make legalize discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Here she is getting hit by a pie and weeping:


Bryant's legacy is apparently felt here in Pittsburgh where the county is about to vote on whether or not to include sexual orientation in an employment and housing non-discrimination ordinance. I fucking swear, in every middle-class gay's rabid pursuit off the gay marriage issue, we forgot the issues that are actually much more vital to all queer people.

I've posted some info below on this ordinance, voted on today by the city:

Did you know that in Allegheny County it is legal to fire someone from their job simply because that person may be lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender?  It unfortunately is true, and happens even today all too often.  We need your support to end this discrimination, and help pass a county-wide non-discrimination ordinance that would protect all LGBT people.

This past summer, Councilwoman Amanda Green introduced legislation prohibiting discrimination on the bases of sexual orientation and gender identity or expression in employment, housing and public accomodations.

Take action now by asking your Councilperson to support Ordinance 4201-08, a county-wide non-discrimination ordinance!

We also need to show the County Council that their constituents support fairness for all people. A hearing for public comment on this ordinance will take place on January 15th at 5:00 p.m. at the Allegheny County Courthouse, 436 Grant Street, Pittsburgh on the fourth floor Gold Room. 

The American Family Association of Pennsylvania has mobilized their membership against this ordinance, and we need to show Councilmembers the broad-based support this bill has! 

Please take a moment to e-mail your councilmember, and attend this hearing.  We must stand up for our voices to be heard!

Please join us by writing to your councilperson! Let them know that you think it is only fair to protect LGBT people from being fired, thrown out of their homes, or refused services, simply because of their sexual orientation or gender identity or expression. Your voice is especially important if you have been the victim of this type of discrimination!

Go here to let your council member know about your support (that is, if you live in Pittsburgh or Allegheny County).

Update: the ordinance passed unanimously.