Movie Miento

The music of troubadors, political prisoners, and socialist revolutionaries of yesteryear attracted a spill-out crowd at an east Long Beach coffee house on Friday night.

For four years the Taller Sur group has organized regular trova nights at Viento y Agua Coffeehouse. They called on their friends to celebrate the birthday with an open mic, a palomazo. Far from a gathering of homogenous Latinos (an oxymoron?) the gathering reflected a cross section of the varied Latin American diaspora to the U.S.: middle aged Latin American expatriates who lived under 1970s military and authoritarian regimes and for whom trova was the soundtrack of resistance, the sons and daughters of those expatriates who refuse to abandon their parents' culture, monolingual U.S. Latinos who resent their parents for not teaching them Spanish and taking them to the home country.

Trova (otherwise known as nueva cancion) is the singer-songwriter genre exemplified by Cuban Silvio Rodriguez, Chilean Victor Jara, and Mexican Guadalupe Trigo (there are lots others, go ahead disagree or comment on your favorite). Trova songs are political, sensual, angry, and soothing. On this night 32 year-old Efren Luna presented a very traditional trova set. He ended with "Ojala" by Silvio Rodriguez, a song about a first love and unmeasured longing, with a cryptic last line that gives the song a political twist.

Luna told the packed coffeehouse that this kind of music doesn't and likely won't get mainstream radio airplay and urged the crowd to keep coming out to the shows. Since he moved to L.A. from Veracruz seven years ago Luna told me he's seen plenty of trova venues close, like Angeles Bohemios in Echo Park, and Café Maestro in South L.A. Nevertheless, the audience for trova is growing.

Trova is best known in large Latin American cities, such as Buenos Aires, Santiago, Mexico City. One of the reasons the trova audience is growing here, according to Tomas Cadena, is because more immigrants from large Spanish-speaking cities have arrived in L.A. in recent years. Cadena gives me his take on the state of trova as he contemplates the standing room-only crowd from the sidewalk on Fourth Street. He began playing trova in the L.A. area about 20 years ago. It was tough back then, he said, now he's teamed up with another trovador his age, Esteban Leon, to put on regular concerts at the Eagle Rock Center for the Performing Arts. A concert they put on almost two years ago may put them into the category of seminal L.A. songs. They called on trovadores to compose songs in tribute to the people who marched at the 2007 MacArthur Park rally that ended in a hail of LAPD rubber bullets. Cadena said they've recorded the songs and will put them out in CD form soon.

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Out of the National Gallery of Art's hundred thousand-plus items, I was searching for one: "Pont Neuf, Paris" by Auguste Renoir. In reproductions the painting reminded me of the midday, summer light and clouds of Guanajuato that I remembered from trips there as a kid. Renoir's shadows of midday traffic on an 1872 bridge over the Seine River were also midday Los Angeles shadows in July.

I left my leather jacket, a ski-jacket liner, a scarf, and a hat at the museum's coat check in the east building on 4th Street in Washington D.C. It was after four o'clock in the afternoon and the temperature was dropping from 30 degrees.

I warmed up by walking up a flight of stairs and one escalator and walking past some Lichtenstein pop art, some minimalist works, a Warhol soup can on my way to the museum's gallery 406B. Manet's "The Dead Toreador" was the big offramp sign that told me I was headed in the right direction. Manet's painting forces the standing viewer into a sort of horizontal crouch. I didn't spend more than ten seconds there before I turned left into the next room.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw "Pont Neuf, Paris" but looked away instantly, like the groom who passes by an open door and accidentally glimpses his bride an hour before saying "I do." If now is not the time, I asked myself, then when?

This poor little painting is in the same room as the painter's more stately, classically beautiful "The Dancer," Pissarro's "Charing Cross Bridge, London," five Monets, including the visually aromatic, "The Artist's Garden at Vetheuil."

"Pont Neuf, Paris" is the underdog of the bunch. Renoir paints a busy crossroads, a scene with several cops, a worker carrying some kind of load on his back, some horse-pulled public transportation (this reminds me of poet Marisela Norte's observations of riding the bus over the Lorena Street bridge in Boyle Heights), a dandy crossing the street with a cane, reading a book. Today he'd be the driver on the 405 talking on his cell phone. Put the book down and look where you're going, buddy.

But is it a view from Paris's old-school Left Bank to the more uptight Right Bank or vice versa? Even though I've only been to Paris once, Renoir's bridge is a very familiar intersection to me. This is a painting about a popular corner, a familiar crossroads for the painter and the viewer. It's Cesar Chavez and Soto, it's San Vicente and Wilshire, or maybe Ventura and Coldwater Canyon.

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It was 45 degrees at 3:30pm when I went for a walk in Sterling, Virginia today. The streets were unfamiliar but the names were not: Compton Circle, Wilmington Drive. I'd never been to this part of the country (about 45 minutes west of D.C.) in winter. The desolation of the landscape is unsettling. It reminds me of the desert north of Hermosillo in the summer. On one kind of tree the leaves remain brown and hanging like corpses on forked crosses. The wind tries to shake them out of their death but is only able to get a rustling that sounds like a nearly dried up waterfall. Branches grow on branches like a pile of old menorahs. The rustling is like a couple of Aztec dancers shaking their rattler leggings.

Unlike the previous two days the sun was out today. This does not feel like the holidays. This does not feel like December. It's all wrong. Where are the palm trees?

I don't think Arnold lives around here. He's the juggling, utensil-trick chef who served us at Benihana last night (he dropped a spatula and a pepper mill). As soon as he stepped in front of the grill I knew he was a compa. A quarter into an Asahi Dry, my wife asked him where he's from. El Salvador, he said. she wanted to talk to him in Spanish. Would he be offended, she asked me. Fifty - fifty, I told her. He could be insecure about his accent and his English, so he wouldn't want to call attention to it. He could be an extrovert, who couldn't care less about his accent and would be amused to find fellow Spanish speakers. Arnold did not speak Spanish the whole night.

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Protestors outside Fremont High School this week made sure their chants were heard through closed car windows on San Pedro Street: "Whose school? Our School!" "Save our school! Save our school!"

This protest is another part of the large scale tug-of-war at L.A. Unified over how to reform campuses that have been drop-out factories for decades. The week before L.A. Unified superintendent Ramon Cortines told the chronically underachieving school it had reached the end of the line. The district, Cortines said, had given the campus enough chances and resources to improve and it hadn't. When a public school doesn't improve test scores two years in a row it's put in a "Program Improvement" category that qualifies it for resources and other help. Fremont High School has been a Program Improvement school for 12 years.

Matt Taylor, a Fremont H.S. teacher for 25 years, rejected the Cortines evaluation of his campus. "We are not a failure, we are not a failing school. We are very much an improving school."

Some test scores appear to back up Taylor's claim. Fremont H.S.'s API score two years ago was a basement-low 492. This year it's up to 524, still light years away from the state goal of 800 (University H.S. in Irvine scored a 904 and Arcadia H.S. scored an 876).

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Rothkos and skaters. Oralay!

About a dozen Lincoln High School teens organized an event this past Sunday called "Of the Word..." at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The skaters came to check it out and stayed for hours (security later asked them to check in their rides), appreciating MOCA's world famous contemporary art holdings, dusted off to celebrate the museum's 30th birthday.

The skaters have good taste. Just last month the seminal Mark Rothko paintings caught the attention of Brangelina.

44 year-old Los Angeles arts promoter Mario Davila helped the teens organize the event through LAartlab, a volunteer group he founded earlier this year. The Rothko-skaters photo, he said, speaks volumes about the teens and L.A.'s arts institutions' efforts to be even more inclusive. "It shows what the Music Center, what MOCA, what LACMA, you know all these institutions, should be striving for, which is making their institutions open and engaging."

Without putting a call to these institutions' media relations departments, I can tell you they'll say they've made strides in recent years to get more diverse patrons through the turn styles. Mario said the non-profit groups should be thinking beyond booking more school field trips to their galleries and venues. A deeper connection independent of the school setting and on the teens' terms, involving their families, could make these young people life-time arts patrons, he said, and that can only help these institutions it the long run.

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Chicano muralists went crazy on George Washington's home. Raul Baltazar agreed I wasn't totally off. A couple of months ago he and fellow painter Melly Trochez finished six outdoor murals and several indoor paintings at Johnnie Cochran Middle School near L.A.'s Koreatown, named after L.A.'s most famous African American lawyer. The school started life 86 years ago as Mt. Vernon Junior High School, built during an immigrant boom in L.A. that unlike recent trends was fed mostly by arrivals from the Midwestern United States.

What's exciting about the Baltzar-Trochez project is its scale and its role in adding another coat of cultural paint to changing section of Los Angeles.

I'd put the project next to that of any L.A.'s major contemporary muralists, such as Judy Baca or Kent Twitchell. It took Raul and Melly eight months and more than 500 gallons of paint to finish the work, the largest mural is about 40 feet tall by 150 feet wide.

Los Angeles was a boom town in 1926 with a dire need for houses and schools for the hordes of immigrants coming mostly from the Midwest. The city was a movie, manufacturing and oil boom town. Thick oil well forests covered parts of Echo Park, most of Signal Hill, and parts of Huntington Beach now awash with beachside condos. Factories churned out cars, tires and little parts for bigger products.

One of Mt Vernon Jr. High's buildings maintains architectural elements that echo the columns at Washington's longtime home, a reminder of the colonial founding father, America's colonial heritage and the civic institutions he helped build.

Thanks to Baltazar and Trochez that building now has Hindu images, cartoonish and multi-ethnic portrayals of teens being teens, all embraced by the large wings of an eagle. After experiencing tagging on their first works, they canvassed area residents, even local Buddhist monks, to find out what images they wanted on the walls.

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Day of the Dead's come and gone, one more year on its march toward becoming this country's newest holiday.

That's what Rutgers University professor Regina Marchi argues in her new book. You can find Dia de los Muertos/Day of the Dead celebrations across the U.S. because there are now significant populations of Latin American immigrants in most states. And the celebrations are attracting non-Latinos, who are picking up the tradition as their own.

We need to go back to the Chicano civil rights movement, 40 years ago, to trace the current growth of the observance. Mostly U.S.-born Mexican American artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s started these celebrations in California cultural centers after trips to Mexico, where it was purposefully forgotten in large cities.

In the 1950s and 60s, Marchi said in an interview, Mexico's ruling class saw Dia de los Muertos as a backward tradition that had no place in large cities undergoing post-World War Two modernization. That changed in the 1970s when Day of the Dead was folded into national tourism campaigns, becoming one of many stops on an extensive cultural tourism trail carved out by the Mexican government.

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Sunday, 2:00 p.m., San Pedro.

For about 30 minutes I've been sitting in my folding chair between palm trees at Point Fermin Park. Earlier, I took out my bicycle from the trunk of my car, rode left on the street that hems the coast, turned right on Western Avenue and felt like I coughed up a lung going up the steep, curvy road toward 25th Street. I returned 45 minutes later. I'd come to Pedro to have breakfast with R, my buddy from college.

I'm facing the ocean, looking at the chest-high concrete wall that divides treacherous cliffs from a long sidewalk and healthy green lawns. A continuous row of Arabic-style stars are cut out from the concrete wall and give ticker-tape peeks at the overcast ocean.

A few minutes ago I saw walk past an Asian couple, a man and a woman in their mid forties. Maybe they're Filipino. They walked with a deliberate aimlessness. The man wore shorts, a t-shirt, flip-flops, and smoked a cigarette. The woman wore a bomber jacket vest and walked a few yards behind the man, making sure he'd not missed anything. The man bowed his head into an oil drum trash can. He found nothing. He moved on to the other trash can, diagonally to his right, and found disappointment.

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The assimilation of Gustavo Dudamel is playing well on the red carpet. Walking into Disney Hall Thursday night, Quincy Jones told me Dudamel reminds him of a young Leonard Bernstein. Andy Garcia said he's proud Dudamel's Hispanic but loves him for being a great conductor. Angela Bassett said she admires his humility and "of the earth" background. And Eli Broad gushed, "He's brought young people together, he's brought the Latino community together, he's brought us all together." And you know that Broad with his billions in philanthropy has as much power to anoint and legitimize as anyone in Los Angeles.

Gustavo Dudamel's Simon Bolivar- tinged declaration on Saturday opened the door even wider. Several on the red carpet repeated his words. Remember Dudamel said he's proud to be Venezuelan, Latino and American. And the echo of those words appears to be in a pinball machine bounce off the Hollywood Hills, the San Gabriel Mountains down to the Anaheim Hills.

But can we consider this list: Salma Hayek, Robert Graham, Gustavo Dudamel, Lupillo Rivera, George Lopez, Julieta Venegas. All are accomplished artists or performers, all either Latin American-born or Mexican American, and all at various stages of personal assimilation and mainstream acceptance. I suppose Lupillo Rivera is the one who sticks out the most. Is it because banda music remains on the fringes of American mainstream culture? When will it join zydeco? When do we wear our foreign nationalism proudly and when do we couch it in larger multi-ethnic terms? When is it OK to be Mexican first? How do the doors of mainstream acceptance open and close depending on how you express your national identity?

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