'Involuntary collages of the past'

“Involuntary collages of the past,” to borrow a phrase Hugo García Manríquez (here reading at an Achiote Press event to celebrate 40 years of Ethnic Studies at U.C. Berkeley) wrote me in a note. This P.S. is an update of the photos from my post titled “Excavations of Subsoil and Surface” with the actual photos Hugo intended to reference, which had somehow fused in his memory, into a single image of the pastor preaching while holding his baby. In fact, they were two separate images, though memory doesn’t always honor the separations that exist in reality, and perhaps in some way that’s for the best.

P.P.S. It seems that Canto Cardenche, too, participates in the pervasive and (I can’t help myself) sort of wonderful tradition in Latin music (elsewhere this tradition is less charming to me) of blaming a woman for whatever heartbreak might occur in the complexities of relationship. Here’s Los Cardencheros de Sapioriz, performing at the Poesía en Voz Alta festival in September 2010 (complete with cell phone ring mid-song, thus proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that indeed they were at a poetry festival). The song is called “Chaparrita, por tu culpa”—oh, how to translate the endearment “Chapparita”...¿¿??... Something like an affectionate feminine version of “Shorty”? Perhaps “Little One” or “Little Girl,” but without the sense that “girl” is young, necessarily—just small. I should be able to do better than that, and hopefully someone will respond to this post and a) take me to task, and b) propose a better alternative.  So anyway, “Chaparrita, Because of What You’ve Done”...

And finally, in the same vein emotionally, if not musically, “Sin ti” (“Without You”) by Very Be Careful, my favorite Angeleno cumbia vallenato band. Who knew it could sound so fantastic to be told “it’s all your fault...”?