Prueba de fotos para Patri

Nothing but bones in the way

“Are you still jumping out of windows in expensive clothes?”

I stole the CD from my best friend’s apartment about 8 years ago. I don’t really know why I just took it without permission. F. would’ve given it to me had I had asked for it. I guess I was high and I liked the cover, which featured a black and white and gray out-of-focus image of a man shouting with blinders on. I tried to listen to it back then, but I never did get much into Tom Waits. To me it sounded like a Bob Dylan cartoon, a send-up and a self-serving homage to the raspy untuned “three chords and the truth” school of American bards.

I have recently gone back to BoneMachine and found this song, “Who are you?” and I can’t help but associate it with my nightmarish mid-twenties: a certain art-deco Miramar apartment languishing in the sticky-humid Puerto Rican nights; the drugs and my lesbian roommates, and a year and a half without sex. There was desperation in the air. I haven’t been that desperate in a long time. Maybe I haven’t been as alive either.

The album also makes me think about love, the ones I’ve lived through, the one I live with right now. Lies and masks and love and Tom Waits wailing in his broken voice “tell me what did you do the last time?/Why don’t you do that/ well go on ahead/take this the wrong way/time’s not your friend”. Not bad for a lazy Saturday afternoon.

Thanks F., for BoneMachine, which is a way of saying thank you for so much that cannot be clearly articulated, except –perhaps- through a Tom Waits song that I stole from your apartment all those years ago.

Adolfo Pinch is my friend

Coming soon to a blog near you:
I like to think that in a past life he was one of Leni Riefenstahl's lovers, much to the detriment of his arch-rival within the party, José Huebels (that's Goebbles, for the non-Hispanics). In fact, it's no secret that Triumph of the Will was a work that featured his behind-the-scenes talent for agit-prop. He may have died in shame as an ex-Nazi hiding out in Paraguay, but he has come back, to Puerto Rico, to make up for it all. A closeted Catholic with a passion for Pope Pious XII, the Caribbean sun is now his purgatory. Visit him and enjoy his attempts at rehabilitation as they are crushed by the San Juan morass:
http://adolfopinch.blogspot.com/

Adolfo's lives are a morality play that holds valuable lessons for us all.

1. Myspace Friend Request

Uno pensaría que lo bueno del MySpace es la oportunidad que esa herramienta brinda de ponerte en contacto con amistades perdidas a través del tiempo y/o la distancia, reunidas nuevamente en el espacio cibernético. Por eso fue que me alegré tanto cuando recibí el mensaje: Guanina se unía a mi grupo de amigos myspeicísticos. No la veía en unos cinco años. Pero me acordaba de la fiesta de despedida que le tiramos el círculo de amistades de aquel tiempo en su mítico apartamento de la Calle Manila, en Santa Rita. Lo de mítico es una exageración, claro. Es una concesión que surge del hábito un tanto irritante de crear epopeyas de mi pasado personal, que en realidad es tan tedioso y mediocre como el de cualquier otro joven puertorriqueño clasemediero nacido a finales de los setenta.

En todo caso el apartamento de la Manila ocupa un espacio privilegiado en mi memoria y ahora es terreno fertil para la imaginación. Guanina, Marcos, Mara y Tito lo ocupaban, todos graduados de la High de la universidad, y allí crearon el centro gravitacional de mi pequeño universo riopedrense. El círculo de amistades que se reunía consetudinariamente allí para fumar pasto y quejarse crónicamente de lo aburrido que es San Juan de Puerto Rico estaba unido, me parece ahora, por un aborrecimiento colectivo, como si todos los presentes en aquellas tardes llenas de humo y South Park estuvieran absolutamente convencidos de que estábamos tan por encima del rol que nos había tocado en la ciudad de mierda que cobijaba nuestra existencia. Los que proveníamos de escuelas privadas y católicas acudíamos a la Manila para lamer nuestras heridas: nos sentíamos privados de la experiencia que tantos otros compañeros tenían de estudiar en universidades americanas, y lo resentíamos. Soñábamos con Nueva York, París y Barcelona, ciudades dignas de nuestra sensibilidad. El contingente de la High de la universidad, por su parte, se paseaba por la vida con un fronte izquierdoso heredado de padres peceperos venidos a más, abogados y periodistas nostálgicos por su Gran Momento de Gloria en la huelga del 81. Ellos soñaban con Nueva York también, pero sus referencias abarcaban el DF, Rio y sobre todo la Habana, donde habían visto la luz al haber sido enviados a Congresos de la Juventud cuando eran pre-adolescentes.

Guanina, teatrera, extrovertida y morena era el centro de la prole de los izquierdosos. Juanca, hedonista, con carro y ojos verdes asumía el puesto que naturalmente le correspondía como capataz de los exalumnos de colegio. Guanina, toda ella niñez formada a base de Colegio Montessori y actitudes esotéricas de neo-hippie, y Juanca, todo él forjado en los suburbios de Montehiedra y las valium que la mamá le alimentaba cada vez que se quejaba de dolor de cabeza, fueron amantes. Era un suceso inevitable. Cuando dejaron de serlo se mantuvieron en plano de mejores amigos y consejeros, la suerte del grupo que lideraban dependía de ello. Y yo, como siempre, en el medio, estancado entre la fidelidad que sentía por mi mejor amigo de la infancia y una chica que que me volaba los sesos a secretas por representar todo lo que yo nunca sería. Nunca le dije a nadie de la lujuria que me provocaban las caderas morenas de Guanina, nunca confesé la ternura que me despertaba cada vez que se quedaba dormida por el arrebato, el esfuerzo que tenía que hacer para no acercármele y removerle el pelo lacio y negro e insondable que le invadía la cara.

Nunca se lo dije a nadie excepto a Juanca… aquella vez.

To-Do List Days

Days like these I am glued to this small apartment. I write extensive to-do lists: finish grant proposal, get on with the paper, fill out taxes, drop off laundry, etc. And then I proceed to ignore each and every one of the items on the list, preferring to worry about not getting any of it done. I make deals with myself, “if you finish that response paper for the Arabic Cinema class, or at the very least get it started, then you can go see Max Ophuls ‘The Earrings of Madame De’ at the Film Forum”. Of course, I will end up opting for niether. Everything’s such a chore on days like these.

In truth I would go see the Ophuls film, if I had someone to go with. I enjoy going to the movies by myself, but it gets tiresome after a while. I think about my love, I fix her features on my mind, waging war against abstractions borne out of distance and time. I want to account for every single pore on her face, but there is no such thing as High Definition memory.

The other day I caught myself complaining to some class-mates that the problem with our class is that everyone’s too damned nice. I almost choked on my beer as I said it. Is that really what I’ve been reduced to: complaining about that standard Ivy League politeness?

A lot of things I’d like to share, the insignificant, monotonous details that nobody cares about. My love does, but a lot of these I forget before our nightly call. Maybe I need more drama in my life, maybe the lack of it is what is so difficult to write. Maybe that’s the problem, I like to see it on-screen, on the page, but I eschew it within myself.

I used to think that this ennui, which I am so intimately acquainted with, was a San Juan thing, the usual Puerto Rican morass. I now realize that it’s me. It has been me all along. One more thing for that to-do list: snap out of it.

Motherless Writing

Finally finished reading Jonathan Lethem´s sprawling Brooklyn bildungsroman last night. I can now return to my life, which I had taken a break from in order to delve obssessively into this book. The goddamned novel had me missing class because I was staying up till 5am reading it, and it´s a wonder I didn´t brake a leg as I walked down subway platforms without putting the book down. Lethem is quite the wordsmith, a word-fucker in fact. His novel before this one, "Motherless Brooklyn", starred an orphaned, tourettic private detective who couldn't stop spitting out freely associated words and phrases. Fortress of Solitude is just that without the Tourrett's: verb-o-rrhea (of the finest quality) just for the sheer fun of it, like catching a spaldeen in mid-flight, which is precisely what its young, white protagonist likes to do in his all-black block.

The novel is certainly uneven, I'm not sure about its supernatural aspects tagged on top of such a clearly autobiographical conceit. For some reason Americans, and Anglos in general, never seem to get Magical Realism quite right. Still Lethem manages to pull off some fine tricks. The novel is composed of sequences, with elliptical jumps of varying degrees in between. The novelist launches into these without giving any expository information, in media res-style. It has a disorienting effect where characters, situations and plot emerge a piece at a time and come together a page and a half after the sequence has begun. The reader is left to pull it all together, forced to make sense of the Brooklynite mid-seventies, much like Dylan Ebdus -the main character- is trying to do.

Not least in the bag of tricks is a white writer giving race relations such a genuine gaze. White guilt, black oppression, ghetto mentality, alternating victim/victimizer attitudes: all of these fuse to create the muddle that was the gaffitied, funkified, proto-gentrified, hippie communed world where the action takes place. And then there is the loneliness and the yearning, two irresistible Lethem staples. Candid and crushing in his portrayal of motherlessness, Lethem might easily fall prey to his defensive hipsterism, but he is always moving.

My thoughts exactly...

"I was sort of a half-breed of colonization, understanding everyone because I belonged completely to no one."