Category Archives: Los Angeles

Los Angeles

February 15, 2012 · 1:15 pm

CULTURE: Cenzontles with David Hidalgo and Jackson Browne

This weekend I spent time in a recording session with Los Cenzontles (the Mockingbirds), along with David Hidalgo, of Los Lobos, and singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, as they recorded the band’s new CD, Regeneration.

An amazing time. Many thanks to Eugene Rodriguez, of Los Cenzontles, for inviting me. I’d never watched a record get made, let alone with two of my musical heroes. We had chats about music, about immigration, New Orleans and Bob Dylan. They now all have my book. :\) Read on, guys!

Los Cenzontles are an amazing story. The brainchild of Eugene and Astrid Rodriguez, they’re a Mexican roots band that spawned a youth center in San Pablo, near Berkeley, and which in turn spawned an expansion of the band.

Cenzontles now have several CDs out and have played with other roots music heroes of mine – Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, in particular.

I felt a little dazed to be around these guys. Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky was one of the soundtracks to my 1970s and his voice remains once of the most distinctive in pop music, I think. (He also has the good taste to continue to play with Claremont’s own master instrumentalist, David Lindley; their Love is Strange CD is very greasy.)

Los Lobos were the band I listened to most in the 1980s. Hidalgo is a deeply musical cat, I always thought, and his tenor voice remains one of the greatest in rock n roll. (For the coolest grungy garage band tune, listen to Georgia Slop.)

I turn to both guys’ music often.

The three songs they recorded sounded like the best of good music — sweet and raw: Adios California, a ranchera in Spanish, The Silence, an elegant song about the drug violence in Mexico, with a sweeping vocal by David Hidalgo, and Jackson Browne adding the harmonies; a third song, collaboration among the band, Browne and Hidalgo, is about the border, which Browne is singing, but isn’t finished and is untitled. Still, so far, it sounds great.

The band will be raising money to complete the album and I’ll post more when they do. Hopefully, by then they’ll have a chunk of The Silence I can put up. Either way, can’t wait to listen to Regeneration.

Meanwhile, what’s your favorite song by any of these guys?

 

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February 14, 2012 · 3:56 pm

LOS ANGELES: Valentine’s sales

Maria, Valentine's Day vendor, Santa Monica & Western, LA

I was coming out of an interview this afternoon and headed to lunch when I came upon a vendor named Maria, from the town of Mitla, Oaxaca, selling Valentine’s flowers and gifts at Santa Monica and Western.

We had a long chat, after I bought some flowers. As festive as Maria and the women selling with her looked, Valentine’s Day to them was less about love than desperation.

After 25 years in the United States, working as a maid, Maria told me she’s been without domestic work for months. Her construction-worker husband is down to only a couple days work in the best of weeks.

So a few days ago, she and a battalion of women went downtown to the Toy District for Hello Kitty dolls. She spent the next few days assembling Hello Kitty Valentine’s packages, and was now selling them from between $10 to $20 each. Then, she went to the Flower District downtown, bought flowers in bulk, and put them together in bouquets for $20 apiece.

“I really haven’t done this before, and it doesn’t make a lot of money, but what else do I have,” she told me, standing at the busy and sun-splashed corner Tuesday afternoon, surrounded by women, unemployed maids, just like her and selling the same kind of stuff.

Reports are that the  economy is returning. Remittances to Mexico from immigrants in the United States are up. Maria and her friends at Santa Monica and Western don’t see it.

A friend, who gave her name only as Magdalena, pointed to a 99-cents store on Santa Monica that closed and was replaced recently by a swap meet, which she helped open. Still, “there’s just no business,” said Magdalena, an unemployed maid and a migrant from the tourist resort of Acapulco.

Maria figured to be out selling until 6 pm, hoping to get rid of the flowers and Hello Kitty dolls she bought. She’s worried, though, because Friday her landlord filed eviction papers from the house she and her husband have rented for 18 years and raised her four children when they couldn’t pay the rent on time. they’d been late before, apparently, and it appears this time her mother fell and required stitches, so the rent had to wait.

“We’re thinking of going back home,” she told me as I was leaving.

 

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February 13, 2012 · 8:00 pm

LOS ANGELES: Solitary Virgin

Here again, another in my attempt to photograph every Virgin of Guadalupe in South LA.

This one was just off Compton Boulevard, painted on what had once been a payphone casing.

If you have photos of the Jefa you’d like to put up, please send them in — doesn’t matter where from….

Virgin of Compton Boulevard

 

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· 2:18 pm

STREETS: Latinas and transgender style

Luisa Rivera

As I wrote earlier, I’ve been doing a story on the murder of a transgender black woman named Nathan Vickers, who also went by the names Chassidy, Chase and Cassidy.

I believe homicide gives reporters an opportunity to write about how a person lived, and less about how she died. As part of that, I’m trying to write about the transgender prostitute subculture in Hollywood.

One person I talked to was Luisa Rivera, a transsexual who has lived here for many years and who comes from Guadalajara. Latina transgenders changed a lot about the culture, which was really about drag queens until they arrived. They began coming in large numbers in the 1980s, mostly from Mexico, she said. As it happened, this coincided with the emergence of plastic surgery, which kept dropping in price as the years passed.

Far more so than other groups, Latina transgenders went for plastic surgery in a big way, she said. Enormous breasts, cheek and buttock implants, lots of silicon and hair weaves. Rivera said. In Hollywood they had surgeons here and in Tijuana to choose from. (They also had a vast, monied john clientele here, who insisted that they remain “fully functional” men, as the back-of-the-book ads in Hollywood sex throw-aways relentlessly put it.)

As we spoke, it occurred to me that Mexican transgenders were very much like other Mexican immigrants, but with a twist.

Mexican immigrants, generally, have spent the first dollars they’ve earned here in establishing themselves back home, mainly by building large houses. So it’s not only a house; it’s a way of showing everyone else how the person has done, that he is no longer the humble, shoeless kid who left the village at 15, who was humiliated for simply being poor. His transformation is complete.

Mexican transgender women also come here for a transformation — wanting to live as women after years of beat-downs and humiliations. They, too, want to show success publicly and quickly. Instead of houses, they spend on their bodies, to show the world, and maybe themselves, that they are not who they were when they were run out of their hometowns and country. Their breasts especially are monuments (pardon the pun, if that’s what it is) to the person they have become and always wanted to be back in Mexico.

Very much enjoying this story. More interviews to come.

 

 

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February 12, 2012 · 9:37 pm

CULTURE (kind of): SNL spoofs tuba thefts

This is getting weird. SNL’s Weekend Update riffed off the stolen tuba story last night. Here’s the full show, check it out at minute 35 or so.

As it happens, I missed it. By weird coincidence, I was out last night at a rehearsal of a banda of guys calling themselves Los BuKnas de Culiacan (that would be a bastardization of Buchanan, the rum), in a garage in Downey (see photos above). Buchanan Rum is a prized drink in the Mexican narco world — a sign of class and having arrived.

One of the songs was “Si No Vienes Conmigo” — which involves a man threatening his girlfriend that if she doesn’t come with him, he’s going to kidnap her and not charge a ransom. Where’s the romance gone?

Actually the band is a mixture of banda and norteno — with tuba, baritone horn, plus accordion — and looks to me a lot like the beginnings of punk rock. Went to the club where they were playing after the rehearsal and they wouldn’t let me and two BBC colleagues in. Reporters strictly prohibited at El Potrero Club in Cudahy.

 

 

 

 

 

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February 9, 2012 · 5:05 am

CULTURE: Tongue and Groove

For several years now, writer and bohemian-about-town Conrad Romo has been hosting Tongue and Groove, a monthly get together of writers, poets, musicians and spoken-word folks of all ilks.

The next one is this Sunday.

Gig starts at 6pm at Hotel Cafe, 1623 1/2 N. Cahuenga. Check it out. Well worth the trip.

 

 

 

 

 

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February 7, 2012 · 1:45 am

MIGRANTS: Tuba thefts

Santiago "Shagi" Mata, tuba player, Maywood, CA

The LA band craze continues to claim high school tubas right and left.

Here’s a link to a story about the latest: Bell High School had two stolen over the weekend, valued at $6,000 apiece. Several other schools have had tubas stolen in recent months.

It’s all about the emergence of the tuba as the emblematic instrument for Southern California in this era, just as the electric guitar was for the 1970s.

With the arrival of Mexican immigrants, and their tradition of house parties, the tuba has become all the rage in SoCal. Great tubists in banda music, like Santiago Mata (pictured here), are paid more than other musicians.

Also, the Sierreno trio — tuba, guitar and accordion — has grown in popularity at these parties.

Hence, tubas, the most expensive of marching band instruments, are in high demand. Most of the thefts have taken place in predominantly Mexican immigrant areas — southeast of LA especially — where banda is hugely popular.

I’ve written a story about this phenomenon and one about the thefts of tubas that many instructors believe is the result.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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February 3, 2012 · 5:10 pm

STREETS: Looking for Amber

Troy Erik

I’m doing a story now about a young fellow, Nathan Vickers, who was a drag queen or a transgender woman, and was shot to death on  a street known as a prostitute hangout in Hollywood in November.

Part of the story is exactly who Nathan Vickers – or “Chase,” or “Cassidy,” or “Chastity” – was, or intended to be. He’d come from the Bay Area and seemed to seeking a transformation of one kind or another.

Helping me figure out Nathan’s world is Troy Erik, a former queen and current activist. A woman named Amber, he told me, knew Nathan well in the days leading up to his death. We went looking for her, as we’d heard she was just out of jail.

We looked at Donut Time (Santa Monica and Highland) and at the adult bookstore  (no name) behind it, and in front of the $1 Chinese Express, whose prices didn’t keep it from going out of business.

We never did find Amber. But Andre, a sociable street fellow, said he’d known Chase or Cassidy. “She always dressed as a woman when I knew her,” he said.

We also happened upon “Grace” – a queen who enjoyed enormous renown in the 1980s because she looked, in drag, exactly like pop diva Grace Jones, and is now homeless. That’s next post.

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January 31, 2012 · 7:36 am

BUSINESS: Kelvin Anderson and World Famous VIP Records

Kelvin Anderson, owner of World Famous VIP Records in Long Beach

I’ve been spending time lately with Kelvin Anderson, owner of World Famous VIP Records in Long Beach, a ferociously independent record store.

Anderson’s store is a landmark, one of the places where rap began in Southern California, and a store that hung on long beyond others because it mastered the art of customer service, knowing what people wanted, and got them in touch with emerging artists who didn’t get any radio play.

But he’s downsizing now, moving from the space he occupied for 33 years and this will probably be his last year, the last independent record store around. “You can’t compete with free,” he told me.

Anderson was there at the beginning of one of the three great DIY musical forces to come out of LA. In Hollywood, it was punk in the late 1970s. In the late 1980s, from Paramount came Chalino Sanchez and Mexican drug ballads, narcocorridos.

Anderson helped mid-wife gangster rap, which emerged in the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, from the garages of Compton then Long Beach came West Coast gangster rap — first with NWA, then with Snoop Dogg and his 213 crew. 213’s first demo was recorded on a drum machine in VIP’s backroom.

Anderson’s advertisement was getting new cassettes in the hands of those with big car stereos and ghetto blasters — “street promotion.”  (Gangster rap was so punk rock.)

Yet I wonder whether these kinds of geographic movements of intense garage band creativity are as possible nowadays, even as technology has allowed everyone to be a DIYer, all from a laptop computer, and avoid entirely the control of major record labels.  “It’s people’s attention span,” Anderson told me.

Hope to have a podcast of an interview with him (a first for me!) that’ll go with the story on VIP’s downsizing, which I hope will run in a few days.

 

 

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January 29, 2012 · 10:29 pm

MIGRANTS: Zeus Garcia, the Michael Jordan of Oaxacan Indian basketball

I had lunch the other day with an old friend, Zeus Garcia.

In his day, Zeus was like the Michael Jordan of Oaxacan Indian basketball – this in the mid-1970s. He and his brothers and cousins formed a basketball team from their village outside the City of Oaxaca and won tournaments for miles around for years. In the 1980s, they all migrated to LA., part of a large Zapotec Indian migration to the area that really heated up during those years. Almost all of them moved to either Pico-Union or Mar Vista or Venice.  (More on why not East LA in a later post.)

Zeus, when I first met him in the late 1990s, was a bus boy and intent on bringing a purer form of basketball to the United States, which he felt had corrupted the sport he loved. He coached a team of Oaxacan all stars, which he called Raza Unida.

Oaxacan Indians are basketball-obsessed folks and the sport plays an enormous role in their lives here in Southern California. Tournaments take place almost every weekend somewhere in the LA area. Zeus was kind of the guru of Oaxacan Indian basketball here. I wrote about him in my first book, True Tales from Another Mexico. I later went to the Copa Benito Juarez in Guelatao, Oaxaca, and watched 7000 people take in the tournament at a small outdoor court in the birthplace of the legendary Mexican president, who was Zapotec.

Zeus is now a truck driver delivering for a fruit and vegetable wholesaler near downtown L.A. He told me his brother, Isaias, himself a great basketball player in his day, last year returned to their village to take on a servicio – a public job that is unpaid and that each member of an Indian village must do if he wants to remain in good standing. Some who’ve refused have had their lands taken. Zeus was full of stories of how folks back home seemed from another world to Isaias, mired in gossip and unwilling to try new things or work hard.

This is the story of many Mexican villages, seems to me. The ones with the drive and gumption leave. Those left behind depend on the dollars sent down from El Norte, and the result is a kind of welfare dependency that drives a lot of returning immigrants nuts.

I may do that story. Keep you apprised as it goes along.

Photos:  Zeus Garcia then and in 1999, and two shots of village teams from the Copa Benito Juarez.

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January 27, 2012 · 2:10 am

Pay Phone Virgin – Broadway & 42nd

Xochilt Market at Broadwway & 42nd Street

Another in my campaign to shoot every Virgin of Guadalupe in LA. This one protects the last pay phone in town.

 

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