VAZQUEZ JOHN MANUEL "JACK" (March 7, 1932 - December 10, 2009.) Son of Manuel Vazquez and Helen Flannery Vazquez, was good times and fun to all he met. He attended Annunciation on Detroit's east side, graduating high school in 1950, while also taking art classes at Cass Tech. He studied architectural engineering at the University of Detroit, where he first met the woman who would later become his wife, Lois Cahill, and the priest who remained a lifelong friend, Arthur Lovely. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1955 and spent the next twelve years studying and teaching Latin in Milford, OH, West Baden, IN, Cleveland, OH, and Toronto. In 1968 he left the Jesuits to marry Lois, and in 1969 they had their only child, a son named Michael. He continued to teach, first Latin and then English, at Nolan Middle School near Seven Mile Road in Detroit, while advising various student groups and serving as librarian. He retired in the early 1990s. He was often to be found in a cafe—always wearing his dragonfly pin—writing in his journal, tutoring young people, and reading poetry aloud with friends. An ardent patron of the Grosse Pointe Public Library, he was a champion of librarians everywhere. He is survived by three sisters, Mary Gottlieb of Portland, Theodora Vazquez of San Francisco, and Carmen Forkin of Detroit, and by his son Michael, an editor and writer in New York. A funeral Mass will be held at St. Paul Catholic Church in Grosse Pointe Farms 12pm on Wed. December 16, 2009

adios, Mr. V. Good luck on the next leg of the trip, and many thanks for the emails over the years. You might not have realized it, but the stream of missives were a great comfort to me after my father died, in so much as they managed to be completely familiar and alien at the same time. No worries: promise keep an eye on Mike.

Well, at least you are saved the hassle of the DMV this year.

Found these videos for Lil Louis' French Kiss on Youtube last night, and went to bed thinking that I should put them up on ye olde blog, along with a note to the effect of: "I never knew these videos existed!"

But when I woke up this morning I dimly remembered seeing these images 20 years ago. It was the wind-up Africans that brought all it back to me. I remember sitting in a dorm room and having an extended conversation about irony, racism, kitsch, cross-cultural confusion, et cetera, et cetera, all of it prompted by that video.

Video director/Youtube submitter "zynsk" (any intel on him or her? Likely him.) writes of the first video embedded above:

This is actually the second version of the video I made for French Kiss. The first one was "pulled" by the record company and they'd only pay for 2 minutes worth of video so here it is.

Said first video is embedded below.

The word punctum is another 20 year old memory, this from college readings of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Wikipedia, as usual, puts it better than I can on short notice, defining as punctum as "the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within [a photograph]."

The kitsch racist wind-up toys in a video for a song I loved are exactly the sort of "wounding, personally touching detail" that could linger for 20 years, as is (now that I think about it) the bogish-seeming tyke in sunglasses. (As one of the wags in the Youtube comments puts it "French Kiss makes babies!") Still, because the video was an kind of addendum to French Kiss, I don't remember those racial angles being prominent in my thinking about the song 20 years ago, having focused instead on the song's completely bananas and largely mathematical structural elements. I wrote a piece in Bidoun last year about, like, glory, phlogiston, the Black Plague and a few other things, and, looking back, the parts about house music now seem to be less about "house music" in general and more about French Kiss in particular.

Still, the house mix was too compelling to turn away from. I was fascinated by math as a kid, and I would often try to graph the mixes on quadrille paper, assigning admittedly arbitrary values and lines and algebraic expressions to beats, vocal lines, crescendos, and fades. This work was easier with the already schematic dance music, and I would often fantasize about working backwards from a graph and creating a song from it. The pictures always struck me as beautiful, futuristic, graffiti-like, and I wondered what the graph of the Greatest Record Ever might look like. I understood from my readings in physics (another interest) that scientists were on a quest to find a grand unified theory that could explain and encompass everything, and I imagined that such a thing must exist for music, too, a graph of the perfect, hidden beat. This notion seemed to solve the problem of the Greatest Song Ever, as whatever song I loved at any moment could be understood to be an aspect or piece of the Perfect Song, with some lines and equations omitted or mathematically transformed. The next Greatest Song Ever didn't erase or eclipse the previous one; they were all the same. The upshot, of course, was that I might have to keep listening, cataloguing, and graphing forever. Saturdays and Sundays I would lay in bed well past noon, more haggard than any child of relative quiet and privilege should have been. [full yackity smack]

Those toys are tantalizing, though: relentless, mechanized, racially charged, fuck-machine-ish. I wrote Zynsk on Youtube to ask him for for the full story on what he was thinking - and what the label objected to! - and will post any response I get.

Off to brunch, but just a closing archaeological detail: What got me thinking about French Kiss was this song:

There is another (live?) version where the schematic, gloriously insane-making part hangs way longer:

I have become a regular invitee to a series of house parties attended largely by a clique of deeply butch, 5-foot and under Guatemalan lesbians (a story for another day), and not a BBQ goes by when they don't play that Hechizeros Band song, the gravel driveway turning into a makeshift dancefloor on a completely random central LA street. When that beeping starts and hangs, getting louder and threatening to go on forever, they go completely crazy. Not to brag or boast, but I have gotten laid more than once directly because of French Kiss, the song a kind of virtual, processing black box where amorphous late night dance floor attraction goes in and comes out the other side focused and rationalized in the, como de dice?, "lets grab a cab" sense of "focused and rationalized." I have completely platonic and deeply loved female (and a few male) friends with whom dancing to French Kiss at 5 in the morning is a fondly remembered peak experience where the ritual, cliff's-edge implication of nookie, the look into parallel universes, is the foundational moment of our bond. Dancing to Hechizeros Band with those grinding Guatemalan girls, with their slicked back, quasi-pompadours, is exactly like that except the gender roles are reversed. When the song changes and the dancefloor clears they wink at me as we crowd off to the bar. And me? All I can do is blush.

A good deal of my Postopolis talk was concerned with Fort Greene nostalgia. Author Nelson George takes us on a walking tour:

I think the 4:30 Movie week long series - Japanese monster movies, WWII week, etc - is where I learned there was such a thing as curating.

I mostly remember this as where I learned to appreciate black & white Hollywood movies from the 30s and 40s, largely for their endless stock of tough-talking, sharp-witted dames.

My pals and I would stay up late (on either Friday or Saturday?) for the Channel 5 movie, which came a built-in aura of "quality" and served as a kind of gateway art-house drug. I distinctly recall two life (or at least 10-year-old mind) altering nights with the Channel 5 Late Movie, one spent with 2001, the other with a moderately edited cut of Straw Dogs. No wonder my cohort of boys grew up a little bent!

Not exactly the neighborhood I grew up in, but close enough. h/t That Bitch!

They say you are really an Angeleno after your first car crash. I am fine, but poor Oksana! She gave her life so others may post to flickr.

One of my first favorite movies as a kid.

I don't know why I find this so strange and shocking, but I almost knocked over my computer when I read that David Foster Wallace was dead. I guess, to he honest, I have always been a little jealous of him (I met him once or twice) and to read that he hanged himself at 46 forces me to radically readjust my fantasy of what his life was like. (Not to mention reassess the notion that he had it so much better than me.) Infinite Jest is one of my favorite books, mostly for the ongoing discussion of how it's possible for 12-step programs like AA work when there is higher power. That part of the book has always pops into my mind whenever I get particularly blue, and I've always found it helpful. It's among the corniest cliches, really: someone writes something that helps someone else and never knows it, but then can't help themselves.

rips david

A quick remembrance of Bernie Mac in the Root.

rips Bernie Mac.

50 years old. Keep your insurance up to date, go to the doctor regular, watch your weight, take a walk, all of you.

photo courtesy flickr user mama wolff; used under creative commons license

"Republicans wear sneakers, too." - Michael Jordan on why he wouldn't endorse Harvey Gantt in Gantt's run for Jesse Helms' senate seat. h/t Christopher Chambers for the reminder.

May he rot there for all eternity.

This leads me to the latest backward attempt to analyze Barack Obama and race. I think the MSM, frankly, needs to just give up on this whole topic, their record is disastrous. First Obama wasn't black enough. Then he was so black that he couldn't win the nomination. Now the question is "How black is too black?" Lemme explain something to you, dog: I just watched a black man carry Iowa and Oregon and then carry roughly nine out of ten black voters. Don't give me that business about Appalachia. You know damn well if I had told you three years ago that a black man would do that you would have laughed at me. With that backdrop I've gotta say, I don't even know what the phrase "too black" means.

One thing I do know, the Times definition of blackness--"a sense of black grievance"--is a joke. And if it weren't Al Sharpton would have dominated the black vote. That sort of flat rendering of black America, keep up this false idea that the most unifying factor of black culture is the ability to make white people feel guilty. Look, I know this is tough to believe, but black people aren't nearly as obsessed with white people, as media would have you think. Fueling that notion is a cheap and easy way to fill some column inches, while not giving a flying fuck about stripping the humanity and complexity away from black folks. [full ta-nehisi]

The NYT op-ed that Ta-Nehisi is shitting on was written by Marcus Mabry. I actually (usually) like Mabry's work, (we might be friendeded on some or another social network) but this strikes me as a case where a (youngish?) black writer was ill-served by white editors who didn't know enough to him ask the right questions. When you're the only member of your tribe in an editorial encounter, and when, moreover, the underlying narrative of that encounter involves you being imported in order to explain said tribe to the publication and its readers, well, you're basically blogging with the aid of a highly compensated human spell-checker. Your editors are very often useless in guiding the piece and are themselves basically sweating it out on their side of the computer screens praying they bet on the right horse/native informant.

florent, by flickr user DrewVigal

I wasn't a regular at Florent, but had three to four good meals a year there while I lived in New York. (More before I got the day job in '99.) This tidbit from the NYT's coverage of the place closing kind of blew my mind:

On June 29 Florent will close. Its rent was to rise to more than $30,000 a month, said [owner] Mr. Morellet, now 54. He started out paying $1,350. The neighborhood, the city and the people who felt it belonged to them were different then.[full story]

30k a month!