#to get this same realization as Correa talks about here

[petit-papillion]

If you have an hour (on your commute, while cleaning the house, etc.), I HIGHLY recommend you listen to Juan Manuel Correa telling his story:

Trigger warnings: death, crash, trauma, pain, gruesome injuries, mental anguish mentioned.

[woundedheartwithin]

from these dark waters (from this dark world)

Far Cry 5 | Hurk Drubman Jr./Female Deputy | Fluff and Angst

First chapter: prologue Previous chapter: chapter one

For notes and extras, find it here on AO3!

Note: I apologize if Hurk seems a tad out of character here...

chapter two

Bailey’s still weak when John kidnaps her to perform his crazy fucking baptism. He’s nowhere near as stealthy as his brother was, just has his people drive up in a van and grab her like in some lame-ass spy movie, and burns rubber before Hurk can do anything. He pulls his pistol and levels it on one of the rear tires, but they’re out of range too quickly.

Hurk runs back to Bailey’s truck and peels out, first intending to chase them, but realizing almost immediately that they’d gotten too much of a head start. He radios the Sheriff instead.

“Go to Fall’s End and get Pastor Jerome.” Whitehorse barks in reply. “He’s closer to John than I am, he’ll be of more help.”

“Oh my. Mr. Drubman riding in like a knight in shining armor.” John Seed croons suddenly.

“The fuck you doin’ on this channel?” Hurk snarls.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be sure to return her to you shortly. We just have a small matter to clear up.”

“You hurt her and I’ll kill you. You hear me, you sonuvabitch?”

“So protective.” John purrs. “Like I said, we have something we need to discuss.”

There’s no point in replying, so Hurk just grits his teeth and floors it.

He roars into Fall’s End about half an hour later, slamming on brakes and screeching to a halt right in front of the Spread Eagle. Mary May is out the door in an instant, shotgun gripped in both hands and a wild look on her face.

“What the hell, Hurk? What’s goin’ on?” She yells when he opens the door and slides out of the truck.

“John’s got the Dep. The Sheriff sent me to rally the troops.” Hurk replies.

“Damn.” Mary May hisses. “We don’t have a fuckin’ army here.”

“Just need a couple people.” Hurk says, jerking a thumb toward the truck. “All ’a Bailey’s shit’s in there. Weapons, ammo, explosives, the whole kit. Should be enough to arm a few folks. Set up an ambush and get ‘em on their way back to Seed’s bunker.”

“Yeah, okay.” Mary May murmurs, scrubbing her face. “C’mon in. Jerome’s inside.”

“Well, look at that! Hurk Drubman Jr. How ya doin’, kid?” Merle Briggs says when Hurk walks in.

“Been better.” Hurk huffs.

“Damn, if Hurk’s all serious an’ shit, then somethin’ big must be up.” Merle says, frowning deeply.

—

They wait until dark before they start moving, headed toward the river with headlights off. Hurk and Jerome lead the convoy in Bailey’s truck, threading through the valley quickly and carefully.

“That’s where he dunks his victims.” Jerome says quietly when they get close. A white van emerges from the trees then, turning onto the main road and accelerating. “Right on time.”

Hurk floors it, the truck’s engine roaring. He goes off the road and cuts through the woods, breaking through the trees and barreling up onto the road in front of the van. They slam into the van’s front end, the impact bone-shaking, and ram it off the road and down the hill. The airbags deploy, stunning them both for a moment, then they’re out of the truck and bounding toward the van. Hurk’s ears are still ringing when he rips open the backdoors, loud enough to drown out the gunshot that puts down the Peggie that Bailey is grappling with.

“C’mon, Ladybug. I gotcha.” He says, grabbing Bailey’s arm and hauling her upright. She sways on her feet and stumbles, and Hurk grabs her waist to steady her.

“See you went the dramatic route.” She wheezes, clearing her throat and nodding toward her truck. Or, well...what’s left of it.

“Yeah, sorry about that.” Hurk replies. “Runnin’ short on roadblocks, and we didn’t wanna tip off the Peggies.”

“I loved that truck.” She huffs.

“I’ll find ya a new one.”

“C’mon. Got a chopper coming for us.” Jerome says.

“Jerome Jeffries, right?” Bailey rasps, removing Hurk’s hands from her waist and taking a shaky step forward. She holds out her hand. “Bailey Correa. I’d been meaning to come say hello before… well, before.”

“Pleasure’s mine, deputy.” Pastor Jerome says warmly, taking her hand and shaking it firmly. “Let’s get out of here first, then we can chat, hm?”

“Yes, sir.” Bailey replies, grimacing. “I might need a little help.”

“That’s what I’m here for.” Hurk says, bumping her shoulder. “Let’s go fuck up some Peggies.”

—

“Goddamn, it is good to see you guys.” Mary May crows when they make it back to town. “Hello, deputy. I’m Mary May Fairgrave, and I am damn glad to see someone finally standin’ up to those assholes.”

“Tryin’ to, anyway.” Bailey says. She lets Hurk help her out of the car they’d taken back into town, and leans heavily on his arm. “I’ve heard good things, Ms. Fairgrave.”

“Please, just Mary May is fine.” Mary May laughs, reaching to shake Bailey’s outstretched hand. “Anything you need, deputy, we’ll get it for you.”

“Call me Bailey. I could definitely use a beer.” She laughs, then elbows Hurk in the ribs. “And a new truck.”

“One beer comin’ up.” Mary May replies warmly. “On the house.”

—

Pastor Jerome approaches Bailey three days later with a strangely guilty look on his face. She and Hurk had been holed up in the Spread Eagle since the baptism incident, and Bailey had spent most of those three days sleeping and eating.

“I’m sorry, deputy. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.” He says in preamble, and Hurk stands from where he’s been camped out on the couch and puts himself between them.

“No way, amigo.” He says, crossing his arms over his chest. “Look at her. She needs a fuckin’ break, man.”

“I know. And I’m sorry to even bring this up. But you’re the only person who can do this, Bailey.” Jerome puts his hands on Hurk’s shoulders and gently moves him aside. “He’s specifically asking for you.”

“Who is?” Bailey asks, sitting up in the full-sized bed Mary May had parked her in.

“A cult soldier. One of John’s Chosen. He wants to defect, and he wants you to help him.”

“And you don’t think this might be a trap?” Hurk huffs, looking at Bailey. “Someone else can do it. You ain’t fit.”

“Shut up, I’m fine.” Bailey retorts. “Where is he?”

“Silver Lake Trailer Park.” Jerome answers, looking relieved.

“We’re going.” Bailey says, throwing the bed covers aside and standing up. She’s wobbly on her feet still, and Jerome winces when she stumbles into the nightstand.

“This is stupid.” Hurk growls. “Which is sayin’ somethin’ comin’ from me.”

“We gotta do it.” She says, looking at him with a pleading look in her eyes. “Maybe if this guy successfully defects, more will do the same. It would save countless lives.”

“Bailey, you can barely stand.” Hurk replies, doing some pleading of his own.

“I’ll manage.” She huffs. “I was training to be a SWAT sniper before I came here. It hasn’t been too long, I should be able to knock the rust off and get my aim back. I can take a position somewhere up high and provide cover while your people get the guy to safety.”

“The general store should have a rifle you can use.” Jerome says, nodding. “I’ll radio the park and tell them you’re on your way.”

—

“Sniper, 200 yards, one o’clock.” Hurk murmurs, watching the Peggie sniper through the spotter’s scope Bailey had literally just taught him how to use.

“One second.” Bailey replies, firing at the last target before adjusting to find the new one. “Could you confirm that one?”

“Yeah, he’s dead.” Hurk chuckles.

A loud gunshot rings through the air, an unsilenced .50 cal, and something slams into the tree they’re taking cover next to about three feet above Hurk’s head. He ducks instinctively and starts to move, but then Bailey hums and takes the shot.

“Confirm?” She asks calmly, and Hurk takes a deep breath and looks through the scope. The dude’s laid out flat, dead as a fucking doornail.

“Yup. Got ‘im.” Hurk replies, looking at her and laughing giddily. “Damn, you are a good shot.” She grins, still looking through her scope, and Hurk takes a moment to appreciate the view. She looks good sprawled out prone like this, the M1 10 marksman rifle slotted against her shoulder like it belongs there, relaxed and loose and natural as she calmly takes aim. Nothin’ quite like watchin’ a beautiful girl with a gun, he thinks fondly.

“Did a few practice sessions with Grace Armstrong before the raid. I had, like, a two week window between Marshal Burke’s arrival and the actual arrest attempt? Maybe a little less. I used it like yoga.” She laughs and glances up at him. If she notices him staring, she doesn’t show it. “Never thought I’d actually have to use it for what it is.” She looks back into her scope, shifting a bit to find the Resistance team, and adjusts her sights. “They’re about to make it to the dock.” She murmurs.

Then Hurk sees movement out of the corner of his eye.

“Shit, Bailey, we got company.” He hisses, turning to face the movement and raising the M16 Pastor Jerome had given him.

“Easy.” She replies. “Take a deep breath, steady, and fire. Okay? Just like hunting.”

Then several Peggies break from the trees all at once and Hurk opens fire, spray and fucking pray.

“Fuck.” Bailey says, picking up the rifle and getting to her knees. She turns and fires a few rounds in the general direction of the Peggies bearing down on them, then thinks better of it and pulls her service pistol instead. Shouting starts below, from the direction of the dock, and Bailey swears again.

“Cover ‘em. I gotcha.” Hurk yells, moving so that he’s blocking her and taking down three more Peggies.

“They just keep coming.” She hisses, but he can hear her turn and lay prone again. “Shit, RPG!”

“What?!” Hurk starts to turn, to see what she’s talking about, and one of the fuckers hits him in the arm. He hisses and turns his attention back to the steady stream of assholes running toward them, and hears a fucking huge explosion behind him.

“No, nonononononono, oh fuck.”

“What’s happening?”

“We gotta move, now.” She snarls. He hears her get up and risks a glance back at her.

“Why, what’s goin’ on?”

“They’re all dead, and I lost the RPG. We’re no longer in control here.” She replies, her tone completely deadpan. “C’mon. Let’s move.”

“What do you mean they’re all dead?” Hurk asks, shooting the last two Peggies that run out of the trees. It’s quiet for a moment, so Hurk turns and jogs to catch up.

“I mean they’re all dead!” She yells, whirling around and jabbing a finger at the dock.

Or what’s left of it, anyway.

The nearby boat house is a starting to catch fire, the dock is completely gone, and there’s nothing but the framework of a burnt out boat sticking halfway out of the water. Bodies are floating nearby. Two are on fire. The round must have hit the boat directly, blowing it up completely.

“Damn.” Hurk says.

“Yeah. Now c’mon. I don’t know where that asshole went.” Bailey replies, turning and jogging down the hill.

—

They’re about halfway back to Fall’s End when the fucking gunshot wound in Hurk’s arm starts to really hurt. The adrenaline in his veins has long since run out, and the ache in his bicep is going from dull to throbbing quickly.

“What’s wrong?” Bailey asks, squinting at him from the passenger seat.

“Nothin.” Hurk answers, staring ahead as he drives one-handed toward Fall’s End. He’s glad it’s his left arm.

“You’re all tense.” She points out. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine, Ladybug, don’t worry.” He says, grinning at her. She just frowns deeper, but she lets it go, staring out the windshield with an unreadable expression on her face. “What about you? You okay?”

“Shoulda been able to save him.” She says quietly. “All of them. It’s not fair.”

“No, it’s not.” He agrees, glancing at her.

“I’ve been… struggling with the idea that— I don’t know. Never mind.” She huffs and looks down at her hands.

“Don’t do that, Ladybug.” Hurk says gently. “It ain’t healthy. Whatcha been strugglin’ with?”

“Something Jacob said.” She murmurs. “That I leave everyone worse off when I try to help. Maybe I should just get out of the way. I only hurt people.”

“Hey, you gave everybody somethin’ to believe in. Goddamn cult’s been killin’ the party ‘round here. But you’re givin’ everybody hope.” Hurk says, reaching over to grab her hand and trying not to wince when he has to use his injured arm to drive. “And a lot more folks would be dead if you hadn’t come along.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I do.”

[amycorreabell]

MR. WARREN BURNS 

I wanna dedicate todays post to my first piano teacher, Mr Warren Burns.  He was the first person to get me to sing, play piano and also play the saxophone.    “Just the Way You Are” was the first song i ever learned to play and sing.  He died when i was 13 from cancer and i didnt play piano again till i was 30 years old.  I didn't even cry about his death till i was 30.  I realized his effect on me was major and he is now one of my angels.  If it wasn't for him i wouldn't be as musical as i am today. He was the first one to really believe in me and my talent as an entertainer.  Mr. Burns thank you for believing in me. Till we meet again,   here is my favorite shirt and favorite song you taught me for you!  Thank you for being my first and greatest inspiration.  

"Just The Way You Are" SONG/LYRICS  By Billy Joel  Don't go changing, to try and please me You never let me down before Don't imagine you're too familiar And I don't see you anymore I would not leave you in times of trouble We never could have come this far I took the good times, I'll take the bad times I'll take you just the way you are Don't go trying some new fashion Don't change the color of your hair You always have my unspoken passion Although I might not seem to care I don't want clever conversation I never want to work that hard I just want someone that I can talk to I want you just the way you are. I need to know that you will always be The same old someone that I knew What will it take 'till you believe in me The way that I believe in you. I said I love you and that's forever And this I promise from my heart I couldn't love you any better I love you just the way you are.

PHOTOGRAPHY:  WWW.CALVINMA.NET @CMAERA 

XOXO, AMY CORREA BELL

[how2to18]

I MET JOSH KUN in 2010, when the exhibit he had co-curated with Roger Burnett, Jews on Vinyl, opened at the Skirball Center. Kun is one of the preeminent cultural historians of Los Angeles, a deeply curious explorer of the pathways and palimpsests of our great universe of a city. He is a professor at USC, a MacArthur fellow, and the recipient of several awards, including the 2006 American Book Award and this year’s Berlin Prize. We were supposed to speak about his recent work on the inescapable Latin influence — led by a Los Angeles–based “wrecking crew” of Latin American musicians — on American music, but any conversation with Kun turns wide-ranging and we ended up talking about the changing landscape of collecting and archiving cultural artifacts in the age of constant content.

Playlists: Uno, Dos …

¤

GUSTAVO TURNER: The book you have edited, The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles, doubles as a treasure trove of information. I was only part of the way through your wide-ranging introduction and I had already built a long Spotify playlist of rare Latin-inflected jazz recorded in Los Angeles, including The Lighthouse All-Stars’ “Viva Zapata,” Cal Tjader’s “Manuel’s Mambo,” and René Touzet’s “El Loco Cha Cha Cha,” which you reveal as the original source for the “Louie, Louie” riff! How do you know when to stop gathering material for such a vast project?

Playlist: The Tide Is High: Los Angeles Jazz

JOSH KUN: Actually, there hasn’t been as much research on the Latin American imprint in Los Angeles music as one might guess and assume, so a lot of the research that we did, building up to the writing and the editing of the The Tide Was Always High, was figuring out exactly what music we should be thinking about. And a lot of that was just collecting records, and doing digs, following trails and clues — a friend would mention an artist or session, and that would lead me to say, “I never heard that record!” And then I’d have to get it — looking on eBay, going to record shops, and that kind of thing.

The fun part …

The fun part! It’s my core methodology. And inevitably, once you finish the book, all these other records are found, and some you ordered are delivered late and so they didn’t make it. You always find new things that might change the stories or add to the stories in some way. [He pulls a copy of Henry Mancini’s Symphonic Soul (1975).] For example, this is one that I was turned onto late, and it’s not in the book but it’s a really great one — Symphonic Soul, by Henry Mancini.

Not the first name one associates with Latin American music.

It’s technically like a kind of pop strings/R&B record as the title suggests, but he’s got all these little Latin traces throughout, like [Brazilian pianist] Mayuto Correa is on there [credited with “Latin American Rhythm”], and Abraham Laboriel [Sr.], the great bass player from Mexico City, whom we interview in the book, plays on this record and it’s a really great example of how these different worlds mix.

All these guys on Mancini’s Symphonic Soul — even the non-Latinos, like [vibraphonist and percussionist] Emil Richards, [keyboardist] Joe Sample, and [drummer] Harvey Mason — these guys were major players in the L.A. funk and jazz world that all played with each other and all were well versed in Latin American rhythms and Latin American songbooks. That was one of the great pleasures and joys of doing this project, is seeing how these different worlds connected. Henry Mancini, who relied on so much of Latin music in his film scores and soundtracks, working with Laboriel and Sample — that is pretty heavy, these are heavy, heavy cats. To have those worlds converge and connect became one of the sub-themes of the book: realizing how intertwined Hollywood studio recording sessions were with the actual club music scenes of jazz and funk, and beyond, in Los Angeles.

Many articles, books, and documentaries have been devoted to “the Wrecking Crew,” the celebrated group of Los Angeles studio musicians that show up in innumerable rock, pop, jazz and funk sessions from the Beach Boys to Elvis to Sinatra to Michael Jackson, but not a lot has been explored about this “parallel Wrecking Crew” which you could (and in many cases still can) call on when you wanted a Latin-inflected sound.

That’s precisely what we tried to address with this book. We have interviews with the top living Latin American session players in L.A. We managed to track down the majority of them. [Radio journalist] Betto Arcos and I did those interviews, and he was really helpful in identifying some of those great L.A.-based players. So we have Abraham Laboriel in there, [Brazilian percussionist] Paulinho da Costa, [Colombian reedman] Justo Almario, [Peruvian drummer] Alex Acuña, [Cuban percussionist] Luis Conte, [Brazilian percussionist] Airto Moreira, and [Mexican-American percussionist] Ramon Yslas. They’re all, save for Yslas, roughly the same generation, and together they played on thousands of recordings in the United States alone. And not just in “Latin” projects, but for major commercial artists like Joni Mitchell, or Madonna, or, in Paulinho’s case, playing on monumental Michael Jackson sellers like Off the Wall and Thriller.

The Latin American Wrecking Crew!

These guys absolutely were the Latin American Wrecking Crew, but interestingly, though they were often brought in to play “Latin music,” for the most part they were playing on everything, because these guys can play everything.

Doing interviews with them was so fantastic — hearing their stories like Justo Almario coming straight from Colombia, to New York, to L.A., and then playing with the Commodores. We wanted to make sure that these stories were out there and how that changes the official record, the history of what we think of as L.A. music. When we were researching the book, we started thinking about the role of Latin American musicians and Latin American music in Los Angeles as a kind of open secret with musicians. Everybody in the session music world knows this fact, that Latin American music is central. And yet, it still feels highly marginalized in the way we talk about music in Los Angeles, and for that matter, the way we talk about “American music” throughout the United States.

Several of the musicians that The Tide Was Always High recovers for Los Angeles musical history are Brazilian. The book includes a great essay by Walter Aaron Clark (“Doing the Samba on Sunset Boulevard,” on Carmen Miranda and the Hollywoodization of Latin sounds) and also a thoroughly original piece by Brian Cross presented as “a speculative history of Brazilian Music into Los Angeles.” Brazil is always a special case when talking about cultural influence: it’s its own thing, but also a central part of the Latin American puzzle.

It’s the Texas of South America.

Absolutely. And, as the really important Ruy Castro books on the development of bossa nova (Chega de Saudade [1990, translated as Bossa Nova] and A Onda que se Ergueu no Mar [2001]) make clear, the relationship between Brazilian music and American jazz has always been a very complex two-way conversation. In Los Angeles, the (barely) unofficial Brazilian ambassador of music has been Sérgio Mendes, who arrived in 1964 for the famous Carnegie Hall bossa nova showcase, headed to Los Angeles and never left or stopped being at the center of the Brazilian musician colony here. Whenever I talk to Brazilian and other Latin musicians, they all say that the first thing they do when they get to Los Angeles is go pay their respects to Sérgio Mendes. He is like the Godfather, or the Pope.

That comes up in literally every interview with Brazilian musicians in the book. They all say that for the most part they came here because of him. Sérgio was an active recruiter and advocate, he opened up this space. After the records he made with A&M Records, he was the guy and everybody talks about him as a power player and as someone who cleared some space for Brazilian musicians to come to Los Angeles and work with him, or work with projects, and that’s when a lot of that kind of cross-bleeding happens of Sérgio Mendes connecting with Quincy Jones and then Quincy Jones becomes somebody who falls in love with bossa and Brazilian music and that’s the Michael Jackson connection. In Brian’s essay, he writes about the relationship between Quincy Jones as producer of Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones as having already done Brazilian records decades before.

And of course, because of Austin Powers (1997), one of Quincy Jones’s biggest hits under his own name ended up being his “Soul Bossa Nova” (1962)!

That “Hollywoodization” of Latin sounds is actually important and something that Brian touches on. It happened to samba before bossa nova. In Brazil, samba is heavily African music, Afro-Brazilian. When it gets exported and enters Hollywood, in part through Carmen Miranda, its “Africanness” is kind of always there, but it’s also not there. Carmen Miranda becomes a de-Africanized version of a woman from Bahia. The world of blackness in the export of this music is a very important topic. When it enters the mainstream of Hollywood, Black Brazil it’s not so present. It’s sonically present but not visually present.

This “whitening” also happened with Mexican brownness in the case of songwriter Agustín Lara and 1930s “Mexican” (euphemistically called “Spanish”) exoticism in architecture and design, as LACMA’s recent Found in Translation shows. Also true about Caribbean music after Xavier Cugat and Desi Arnaz …

It’s what typically happens in the United States. It’s everywhere. And especially in the Americas, it’s rare when an Afro-Latino or Afro-Latina rises to the top financially, successfully in pop music.

Celia Cruz would be the exception.

Yes, she’s the exception. But for the rest, there’s always a kind of de-Africanizing that has to happen. I think of Shakira as a great example. She comes from a city with a prominent African musical community, Barranquilla, and yet there’s a kind of, and I don’t say this as a critique of her individually, but there is a whitening that has historically happened in the industry, particularly in the Americas. A kind of browning — or “beigeing” to use the old term.

There’s a chapter in the book about Latin American dance and its relationship to music in L.A. by Cindy García. Juliet McMains wrote a recent book about salsa in in the United States, and there’s a great chapter on Los Angeles about how salsa dance in L.A. was heavily influenced not by Afro-Caribbeans or Afro-Latinos, but instead was heavily influenced by the way people danced in Hollywood productions. Los Angeles’s version of salsa was so distinct from the East Coast because people were modeling their moves after Hollywood.

It’s the same thing that happens with jazz and R&B turning into big-band and swing. Tango is also one of the most egregious examples, where in Hollywood it becomes this weirdly stylized Valentino thing that is not even remotely close to the complex tango styles in Buenos Aires.

But then the question becomes how do you write about all this or talk about all this without clinging to an authenticity narrative or clinging to a purity narrative, which I did not want to do. I didn’t want to say that “this is bad and this is good” because, especially in a place like Los Angeles, it all gets thrown together, and it becomes a constant negotiation of high and low, and “authentic” Latin American music versus completely “Hollywoodized” versions of Latin America through Disney and lots of other channels. While it’s important to track those obviously, and provide critical histories of those, I think we were careful to not demonize in one direction and praise in another, but actually figure out how do we deal with the middle ground, which is kind of the norm here.

Going back to Sérgio Mendes, he would be a great example of that. He has been one of the most commercial successful Latin musicians here for decades, but his music is deeply uncool for many “hip” listeners.

Sérgio is a great example. Those early Brazil ’66 records were brilliant in terms of genre splicing and him learning the market. Sérgio covered “For What It’s Worth,” the Buffalo Springfield song about the Sunset Strip riots in 1966. It’s a really beautiful, kind of awesome, slow funk song. How perfect is that? It’s him saying, “Come on — I’m an L.A. artist, so I can do a Brazilian funk version of the Buffalo Springfield song about white kids rioting on the Sunset Strip and that’s my purview, and that can be part of my songbook and I can cash in on it, but also make something new.” And I love his songbook!

Speaking of songbooks, you also rescue the figure of Trini Lopez. One could argue that the unstoppable rise of the DJ killed that type of entertainment in Los Angeles — the super-professional live bands of session players that could play all the big hits in their own style. Los Angeles in the 1960s had frontmen like Trini Lopez, Johnny Rivers, José Feliciano, who specialized in what today we would call “covers.”

Trini Lopez was, as he was often called, a human jukebox. At PJ’s, he would churn out all the hits of the day and do his own Latin spin on them. That’s something that I really like. I have a soft spot for that modality.

Before we move over from Brazil, we have to talk about Carmen Miranda. In a sense, the Carmen Miranda project of Americanizing (or Hollywoodizing) Brazilian music in the 1940s is a good example of an L.A. modernist project.

I completely agree.

In the Busby Berkeley sense.

Absolutely! Hollywood’s role in that is big. We did a tribute to Latin American composers in Hollywood as part of this project at the Getty where we put together a big band and we did songs by Esquivel, Agustín Lara, María Grever, Lalo Schifrin, and Ary Barroso. Part of that show was a claim about modernism, making the claim that these are modernist strategies that are not ever talked about as such, or rarely.

An image that I always think about is the iconic photographs of the Koenig Case Study Houses, and all these iconic Julius Shulman shots of midcentury Los Angeles with upper-middle-class or upper-class white couples in their perfect midcentury outfits, and the Eames chairs, and all the right furniture, and they always have a hi-fi. And nine times out 10, what’s on that hi-fi? It’s always Pérez Prado records or Esquivel records! There’s a soundtrack to midcentury modern and it’s often Latin American–influenced, but it’s been left out, I think, of the narrative of what counts as L.A. modernism. The Tide Was Always High makes the argument that Latinos and Latin American culture are a kind of “ghost in the machine” of L.A. modernism. It is always there haunting it, but it’s rarely talked about with the centrality that it deserves.

It’s like a musical counterpart to the “Mayan” influence in modernist architecture in Los Angeles.

This has been a big part of the work of Jesse Lerner, a curator, writer, and filmmaker who did a series on Latin American experimental film for Pacific Standard Time, called Ism Ism Ism / Ismo Ismo Ismo. And he co-curated the exhibit about Disney in Latin America with Rubén Ortíz Torres. Jesse is an amazing thinker and he wrote a great book called The Maya of Modernism, and it’s all about the role of the “Maya” in the modernist imagination, from the Ennis House to the Aztec Hotel in Monrovia, which is actually Mayan-inspired design but it’s called “Aztec.”

With a soundtrack by Yma Sumac!

We had an essay about Peruvian, Incan singer Yma Sumac in the book and we did a concert paying tribute to her at the Hammer. The singers had to figure out how they were going to do this, and often they would ask for lyric sheets, of which there aren’t any. One of the singers emailed, “Can you send me the original quechua lyrics?” And I said, “I don’t think they’re in quechua.” And she started thinking — and she’s from Mexico City — and she said, “I think they are.” So we started poking around, and according to the only book that’s been written about Yma Sumac they are wordless. It’s not quechua. And she said, “Oh yeah, but everything is wrong in that book and he makes claims that she’s singing this and she’s not singing that.”

Was it quechua?

It went back and forth and we ended up with: “It’s not quechua, but it could be quechua, but it could not be, and it’s wordless and it isn’t”! And that was part of what was happening, that there was this open play with exporting manufactured authenticity, and creating this commodified image in the case of “Yma Sumac,” of the Incan Princess who ends up at the Hollywood Bowl or Capitol Records and people are buying her records because she’s supposedly singing in quechua, when in fact, she might just be making words up.

But it doesn’t at all detract from the extraordinary arrangements and the extraordinary talent of her as a singer and performer, so it was really interesting and instructive to watch contemporary artists grapple with that and figure out how they perform themselves in relationship to that.

I wanted to bring up the issue of Latin musical communities in Los Angeles and gentrification. For example, the Boyle Heights community.

I don’t live in Boyle Heights and I cant speak for anyone in Boyle Heights and so I leave those debates to the folks who are rooted in their community and are doing what they believe is the important work for the sustainability of their community and the sustainability of their histories. And I support that 100 percent.

The Boyle Heights of late 20th and early 21st centuries is not the Boyle Heights of the 1950s and ’60s, and it’s important to not confuse those, they are different histories. The Boyle Heights that produced so much of the R&B and early Chicano Boogie Woogie, the Pachuco boogie music of the ’50s, was very different from the Boyle Heights that emerges post-1980s, where Boyle Heights goes from being one of the most multiethnic, multiracial, multilingual immigrant neighborhoods in the country to being one of the least, to become predominantly a Mexican neighborhood. Those are different histories, and I think that we have to approach them very differently and I always try to resist a little bit this, “Oh, it used to be an immigrant neighborhood, and it used to always welcome immigrants.” Well, that’s true, but it’s a different political and cultural climate right now.

Although gentrification and redevelopment are constants in Los Angeles.

These are real issues. I always remind my students that people are fighting because they feel that something’s at stake and there’s a real visceral fear that something is being taken away, and we have too much history in Los Angeles where we’ve seen communities be displaced. We’ve seen people being bulldozed, literally, by corporate, city, commercial entertainment developments, and I don’t think we can quickly turn a blind eye to it. So I think it’s really important.

I did a big project from the Phillips Recording Company a few years ago, where we were looking at the history of this very important record shop and music store that was in Boyle Heights from the 1930s to the 1980s. Latino, African American, Japanese American — it’s really this idealized, archetypal example of that story. Even in doing that project, I started worrying about what that nostalgia was about. Why was I and why were so many of the people that I knew so invested in that earlier Boyle Heights story and less invested in the contemporary Boyle Heights story? Where are all the histories of what’s been happening since the ’80s in Boyle Heights? And that’s been told largely through Chicano historians, it’s been largely told by Chicano activists and Chicano musicians. The rise of son jarocho from Boyle Heights as a community force, the rise of Chicano alternative music or rock in español — those histories are being written right now and I think that’s really important and I’m looking forward to 10 years from now what views we have backward to this moment.

It’s really easy to talk about — especially for a white secular Jewish guy — to cling to these old stories and I want to call myself out, I wanna check myself and others on it, to say, “What are we not talking about if we keep talking about the 1950s?” I’m talking about the continual inequalities of Latino life in Los Angeles, the continual transformation of the public spaces of Los Angeles, the ongoing patterns of redevelopment.

I also wanted to bring up the role of thrift stores and record collecting in the survival of a lot of this culture.

Physical thrift stores or digital ones like eBay?

Both, I guess.

These days I’m usually pretty target-driven. My first step: EBay. Set up an eBay search. Second step: Set up a Google News alert. And then start looking for the specific thing you’re looking for. Because pre-eBay I would spend a lot of time traveling, a lot of time driving, even flying to thrift stores in neighborhoods where things might be located and it would always be a crapshoot, you know? You might find something you’re looking for and you’d find a lot of things you were not looking for which might not be useful for the project. I find that online searches can be good at helping you target things. Most of the things I’m interested in are not in official archives, in formal archives, and so it’s hard to find them, but eBay can be very, very helpful.

Don’t you worry about the future of these artifacts you write about?

I do. But that’s another difficult question. Institutionalizing it could take on all kinds of different shapes. We’re just starting at USC to think more about this in terms of Southern California collections. Everyone is getting rid of their records. After I did the Jewish album cover book, that was almost 10 years ago, and to this day I get at least a few emails a year from somebody saying, “I live in blah blah blah and my uncle just died, or my father died and I got a box of Yiddish 78s and I don’t know if I should throw them in the trash or, you know, can I send them to you?” I don’t want them all, though! Part of me always wants to say, “Yeah! Send them to me,” because I do want them all. I want it all in theory, but I don’t want it all in dust and boxes and there’s so much stuff.

And you can’t preserve it all?

We can’t. And so the question becomes: “What do you preserve? And why?” That’s why I think the role of the curator and the role of the archivist, is really tricky.

Music Man Murray, who had a record shop, when he was dying, everyone was trying to figure out what to do with his collection and who would buy it. And I was trying to convince USC to buy it. And we worked really hard to figure out investors, and things, and it became this big question of like, “Well, its 400,000 objects. Where are we going to put that?” To buy that is actually the cheap part. The expensive part is long-term storage, digitization, ongoing preservation. It’s super expensive. And then what? We have four warehouses full of 400,000 things. Who’s going to staff it? Would people visit it? Who’s going to index it and do the metadata? These are really important questions.

It’s much harder than the Library of Congress picking 25 films a year to preserve.

It is. But I understand why and I am very sympathetic to that method. My sheet music project with the L.A. Public Library involved working on an archive of 100,000 pieces of sheet music and songbooks and figuring out which 200 of them are the ones that should be in a book and be our primary storytelling devices.

Don’t you feel you’re killing part of history when you choose something over something else?

Oh, I know I am. That’s why in all my projects I am careful to say, “This is not an official version, this is my version, in this book, in this project.” And if you, Gustavo, went and did this, it would be, and should be, a totally different book.

I had to become very comfortable with the inherent failure of all my archivist projects. Even this new book, there’re so many things that aren’t in there and there’re so many different ways of telling this exact same story, it can keep you up at night. It does keep me up at night.

But it really can make you crazy if you worry about it all the time, and then you never write the book.

¤

Gustavo Turner is a writer and photographer in Los Angeles. Instagram: @gustavoturner and Twitter: @eyecantina.

The post The Latin American Wrecking Crew: A Conversation with Josh Kun appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff]

I MET JOSH KUN in 2010, when the exhibit he had co-curated with Roger Burnett, Jews on Vinyl, opened at the Skirball Center. Kun is one of the preeminent cultural historians of Los Angeles, a deeply curious explorer of the pathways and palimpsests of our great universe of a city. He is a professor at USC, a MacArthur fellow, and the recipient of several awards, including the 2006 American Book Award and this year’s Berlin Prize. We were supposed to speak about his recent work on the inescapable Latin influence — led by a Los Angeles–based “wrecking crew” of Latin American musicians — on American music, but any conversation with Kun turns wide-ranging and we ended up talking about the changing landscape of collecting and archiving cultural artifacts in the age of constant content.

Playlists: Uno, Dos …

¤

GUSTAVO TURNER: The book you have edited, The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles, doubles as a treasure trove of information. I was only part of the way through your wide-ranging introduction and I had already built a long Spotify playlist of rare Latin-inflected jazz recorded in Los Angeles, including The Lighthouse All-Stars’ “Viva Zapata,” Cal Tjader’s “Manuel’s Mambo,” and René Touzet’s “El Loco Cha Cha Cha,” which you reveal as the original source for the “Louie, Louie” riff! How do you know when to stop gathering material for such a vast project?

Playlist: The Tide Is High: Los Angeles Jazz

JOSH KUN: Actually, there hasn’t been as much research on the Latin American imprint in Los Angeles music as one might guess and assume, so a lot of the research that we did, building up to the writing and the editing of the The Tide Was Always High, was figuring out exactly what music we should be thinking about. And a lot of that was just collecting records, and doing digs, following trails and clues — a friend would mention an artist or session, and that would lead me to say, “I never heard that record!” And then I’d have to get it — looking on eBay, going to record shops, and that kind of thing.

The fun part …

The fun part! It’s my core methodology. And inevitably, once you finish the book, all these other records are found, and some you ordered are delivered late and so they didn’t make it. You always find new things that might change the stories or add to the stories in some way. [He pulls a copy of Henry Mancini’s Symphonic Soul (1975).] For example, this is one that I was turned onto late, and it’s not in the book but it’s a really great one — Symphonic Soul, by Henry Mancini.

Not the first name one associates with Latin American music.

It’s technically like a kind of pop strings/R&B record as the title suggests, but he’s got all these little Latin traces throughout, like [Brazilian pianist] Mayuto Correa is on there [credited with “Latin American Rhythm”], and Abraham Laboriel [Sr.], the great bass player from Mexico City, whom we interview in the book, plays on this record and it’s a really great example of how these different worlds mix.

All these guys on Mancini’s Symphonic Soul — even the non-Latinos, like [vibraphonist and percussionist] Emil Richards, [keyboardist] Joe Sample, and [drummer] Harvey Mason — these guys were major players in the L.A. funk and jazz world that all played with each other and all were well versed in Latin American rhythms and Latin American songbooks. That was one of the great pleasures and joys of doing this project, is seeing how these different worlds connected. Henry Mancini, who relied on so much of Latin music in his film scores and soundtracks, working with Laboriel and Sample — that is pretty heavy, these are heavy, heavy cats. To have those worlds converge and connect became one of the sub-themes of the book: realizing how intertwined Hollywood studio recording sessions were with the actual club music scenes of jazz and funk, and beyond, in Los Angeles.

Many articles, books, and documentaries have been devoted to “the Wrecking Crew,” the celebrated group of Los Angeles studio musicians that show up in innumerable rock, pop, jazz and funk sessions from the Beach Boys to Elvis to Sinatra to Michael Jackson, but not a lot has been explored about this “parallel Wrecking Crew” which you could (and in many cases still can) call on when you wanted a Latin-inflected sound.

That’s precisely what we tried to address with this book. We have interviews with the top living Latin American session players in L.A. We managed to track down the majority of them. [Radio journalist] Betto Arcos and I did those interviews, and he was really helpful in identifying some of those great L.A.-based players. So we have Abraham Laboriel in there, [Brazilian percussionist] Paulinho da Costa, [Colombian reedman] Justo Almario, [Peruvian drummer] Alex Acuña, [Cuban percussionist] Luis Conte, [Brazilian percussionist] Airto Moreira, and [Mexican-American percussionist] Ramon Yslas. They’re all, save for Yslas, roughly the same generation, and together they played on thousands of recordings in the United States alone. And not just in “Latin” projects, but for major commercial artists like Joni Mitchell, or Madonna, or, in Paulinho’s case, playing on monumental Michael Jackson sellers like Off the Wall and Thriller.

The Latin American Wrecking Crew!

These guys absolutely were the Latin American Wrecking Crew, but interestingly, though they were often brought in to play “Latin music,” for the most part they were playing on everything, because these guys can play everything.

Doing interviews with them was so fantastic — hearing their stories like Justo Almario coming straight from Colombia, to New York, to L.A., and then playing with the Commodores. We wanted to make sure that these stories were out there and how that changes the official record, the history of what we think of as L.A. music. When we were researching the book, we started thinking about the role of Latin American musicians and Latin American music in Los Angeles as a kind of open secret with musicians. Everybody in the session music world knows this fact, that Latin American music is central. And yet, it still feels highly marginalized in the way we talk about music in Los Angeles, and for that matter, the way we talk about “American music” throughout the United States.

Several of the musicians that The Tide Was Always High recovers for Los Angeles musical history are Brazilian. The book includes a great essay by Walter Aaron Clark (“Doing the Samba on Sunset Boulevard,” on Carmen Miranda and the Hollywoodization of Latin sounds) and also a thoroughly original piece by Brian Cross presented as “a speculative history of Brazilian Music into Los Angeles.” Brazil is always a special case when talking about cultural influence: it’s its own thing, but also a central part of the Latin American puzzle.

It’s the Texas of South America.

Absolutely. And, as the really important Ruy Castro books on the development of bossa nova (Chega de Saudade [1990, translated as Bossa Nova] and A Onda que se Ergueu no Mar [2001]) make clear, the relationship between Brazilian music and American jazz has always been a very complex two-way conversation. In Los Angeles, the (barely) unofficial Brazilian ambassador of music has been Sérgio Mendes, who arrived in 1964 for the famous Carnegie Hall bossa nova showcase, headed to Los Angeles and never left or stopped being at the center of the Brazilian musician colony here. Whenever I talk to Brazilian and other Latin musicians, they all say that the first thing they do when they get to Los Angeles is go pay their respects to Sérgio Mendes. He is like the Godfather, or the Pope.

That comes up in literally every interview with Brazilian musicians in the book. They all say that for the most part they came here because of him. Sérgio was an active recruiter and advocate, he opened up this space. After the records he made with A&M Records, he was the guy and everybody talks about him as a power player and as someone who cleared some space for Brazilian musicians to come to Los Angeles and work with him, or work with projects, and that’s when a lot of that kind of cross-bleeding happens of Sérgio Mendes connecting with Quincy Jones and then Quincy Jones becomes somebody who falls in love with bossa and Brazilian music and that’s the Michael Jackson connection. In Brian’s essay, he writes about the relationship between Quincy Jones as producer of Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones as having already done Brazilian records decades before.

And of course, because of Austin Powers (1997), one of Quincy Jones’s biggest hits under his own name ended up being his “Soul Bossa Nova” (1962)!

That “Hollywoodization” of Latin sounds is actually important and something that Brian touches on. It happened to samba before bossa nova. In Brazil, samba is heavily African music, Afro-Brazilian. When it gets exported and enters Hollywood, in part through Carmen Miranda, its “Africanness” is kind of always there, but it’s also not there. Carmen Miranda becomes a de-Africanized version of a woman from Bahia. The world of blackness in the export of this music is a very important topic. When it enters the mainstream of Hollywood, Black Brazil it’s not so present. It’s sonically present but not visually present.

This “whitening” also happened with Mexican brownness in the case of songwriter Agustín Lara and 1930s “Mexican” (euphemistically called “Spanish”) exoticism in architecture and design, as LACMA’s recent Found in Translation shows. Also true about Caribbean music after Xavier Cugat and Desi Arnaz …

It’s what typically happens in the United States. It’s everywhere. And especially in the Americas, it’s rare when an Afro-Latino or Afro-Latina rises to the top financially, successfully in pop music.

Celia Cruz would be the exception.

Yes, she’s the exception. But for the rest, there’s always a kind of de-Africanizing that has to happen. I think of Shakira as a great example. She comes from a city with a prominent African musical community, Barranquilla, and yet there’s a kind of, and I don’t say this as a critique of her individually, but there is a whitening that has historically happened in the industry, particularly in the Americas. A kind of browning — or “beigeing” to use the old term.

There’s a chapter in the book about Latin American dance and its relationship to music in L.A. by Cindy García. Juliet McMains wrote a recent book about salsa in in the United States, and there’s a great chapter on Los Angeles about how salsa dance in L.A. was heavily influenced not by Afro-Caribbeans or Afro-Latinos, but instead was heavily influenced by the way people danced in Hollywood productions. Los Angeles’s version of salsa was so distinct from the East Coast because people were modeling their moves after Hollywood.

It’s the same thing that happens with jazz and R&B turning into big-band and swing. Tango is also one of the most egregious examples, where in Hollywood it becomes this weirdly stylized Valentino thing that is not even remotely close to the complex tango styles in Buenos Aires.

But then the question becomes how do you write about all this or talk about all this without clinging to an authenticity narrative or clinging to a purity narrative, which I did not want to do. I didn’t want to say that “this is bad and this is good” because, especially in a place like Los Angeles, it all gets thrown together, and it becomes a constant negotiation of high and low, and “authentic” Latin American music versus completely “Hollywoodized” versions of Latin America through Disney and lots of other channels. While it’s important to track those obviously, and provide critical histories of those, I think we were careful to not demonize in one direction and praise in another, but actually figure out how do we deal with the middle ground, which is kind of the norm here.

Going back to Sérgio Mendes, he would be a great example of that. He has been one of the most commercial successful Latin musicians here for decades, but his music is deeply uncool for many “hip” listeners.

Sérgio is a great example. Those early Brazil ’66 records were brilliant in terms of genre splicing and him learning the market. Sérgio covered “For What It’s Worth,” the Buffalo Springfield song about the Sunset Strip riots in 1966. It’s a really beautiful, kind of awesome, slow funk song. How perfect is that? It’s him saying, “Come on — I’m an L.A. artist, so I can do a Brazilian funk version of the Buffalo Springfield song about white kids rioting on the Sunset Strip and that’s my purview, and that can be part of my songbook and I can cash in on it, but also make something new.” And I love his songbook!

Speaking of songbooks, you also rescue the figure of Trini Lopez. One could argue that the unstoppable rise of the DJ killed that type of entertainment in Los Angeles — the super-professional live bands of session players that could play all the big hits in their own style. Los Angeles in the 1960s had frontmen like Trini Lopez, Johnny Rivers, José Feliciano, who specialized in what today we would call “covers.”

Trini Lopez was, as he was often called, a human jukebox. At PJ’s, he would churn out all the hits of the day and do his own Latin spin on them. That’s something that I really like. I have a soft spot for that modality.

Before we move over from Brazil, we have to talk about Carmen Miranda. In a sense, the Carmen Miranda project of Americanizing (or Hollywoodizing) Brazilian music in the 1940s is a good example of an L.A. modernist project.

I completely agree.

In the Busby Berkeley sense.

Absolutely! Hollywood’s role in that is big. We did a tribute to Latin American composers in Hollywood as part of this project at the Getty where we put together a big band and we did songs by Esquivel, Agustín Lara, María Grever, Lalo Schifrin, and Ary Barroso. Part of that show was a claim about modernism, making the claim that these are modernist strategies that are not ever talked about as such, or rarely.

An image that I always think about is the iconic photographs of the Koenig Case Study Houses, and all these iconic Julius Shulman shots of midcentury Los Angeles with upper-middle-class or upper-class white couples in their perfect midcentury outfits, and the Eames chairs, and all the right furniture, and they always have a hi-fi. And nine times out 10, what’s on that hi-fi? It’s always Pérez Prado records or Esquivel records! There’s a soundtrack to midcentury modern and it’s often Latin American–influenced, but it’s been left out, I think, of the narrative of what counts as L.A. modernism. The Tide Was Always High makes the argument that Latinos and Latin American culture are a kind of “ghost in the machine” of L.A. modernism. It is always there haunting it, but it’s rarely talked about with the centrality that it deserves.

It’s like a musical counterpart to the “Mayan” influence in modernist architecture in Los Angeles.

This has been a big part of the work of Jesse Lerner, a curator, writer, and filmmaker who did a series on Latin American experimental film for Pacific Standard Time, called Ism Ism Ism / Ismo Ismo Ismo. And he co-curated the exhibit about Disney in Latin America with Rubén Ortíz Torres. Jesse is an amazing thinker and he wrote a great book called The Maya of Modernism, and it’s all about the role of the “Maya” in the modernist imagination, from the Ennis House to the Aztec Hotel in Monrovia, which is actually Mayan-inspired design but it’s called “Aztec.”

With a soundtrack by Yma Sumac!

We had an essay about Peruvian, Incan singer Yma Sumac in the book and we did a concert paying tribute to her at the Hammer. The singers had to figure out how they were going to do this, and often they would ask for lyric sheets, of which there aren’t any. One of the singers emailed, “Can you send me the original quechua lyrics?” And I said, “I don’t think they’re in quechua.” And she started thinking — and she’s from Mexico City — and she said, “I think they are.” So we started poking around, and according to the only book that’s been written about Yma Sumac they are wordless. It’s not quechua. And she said, “Oh yeah, but everything is wrong in that book and he makes claims that she’s singing this and she’s not singing that.”

Was it quechua?

It went back and forth and we ended up with: “It’s not quechua, but it could be quechua, but it could not be, and it’s wordless and it isn’t”! And that was part of what was happening, that there was this open play with exporting manufactured authenticity, and creating this commodified image in the case of “Yma Sumac,” of the Incan Princess who ends up at the Hollywood Bowl or Capitol Records and people are buying her records because she’s supposedly singing in quechua, when in fact, she might just be making words up.

But it doesn’t at all detract from the extraordinary arrangements and the extraordinary talent of her as a singer and performer, so it was really interesting and instructive to watch contemporary artists grapple with that and figure out how they perform themselves in relationship to that.

I wanted to bring up the issue of Latin musical communities in Los Angeles and gentrification. For example, the Boyle Heights community.

I don’t live in Boyle Heights and I cant speak for anyone in Boyle Heights and so I leave those debates to the folks who are rooted in their community and are doing what they believe is the important work for the sustainability of their community and the sustainability of their histories. And I support that 100 percent.

The Boyle Heights of late 20th and early 21st centuries is not the Boyle Heights of the 1950s and ’60s, and it’s important to not confuse those, they are different histories. The Boyle Heights that produced so much of the R&B and early Chicano Boogie Woogie, the Pachuco boogie music of the ’50s, was very different from the Boyle Heights that emerges post-1980s, where Boyle Heights goes from being one of the most multiethnic, multiracial, multilingual immigrant neighborhoods in the country to being one of the least, to become predominantly a Mexican neighborhood. Those are different histories, and I think that we have to approach them very differently and I always try to resist a little bit this, “Oh, it used to be an immigrant neighborhood, and it used to always welcome immigrants.” Well, that’s true, but it’s a different political and cultural climate right now.

Although gentrification and redevelopment are constants in Los Angeles.

These are real issues. I always remind my students that people are fighting because they feel that something’s at stake and there’s a real visceral fear that something is being taken away, and we have too much history in Los Angeles where we’ve seen communities be displaced. We’ve seen people being bulldozed, literally, by corporate, city, commercial entertainment developments, and I don’t think we can quickly turn a blind eye to it. So I think it’s really important.

I did a big project from the Phillips Recording Company a few years ago, where we were looking at the history of this very important record shop and music store that was in Boyle Heights from the 1930s to the 1980s. Latino, African American, Japanese American — it’s really this idealized, archetypal example of that story. Even in doing that project, I started worrying about what that nostalgia was about. Why was I and why were so many of the people that I knew so invested in that earlier Boyle Heights story and less invested in the contemporary Boyle Heights story? Where are all the histories of what’s been happening since the ’80s in Boyle Heights? And that’s been told largely through Chicano historians, it’s been largely told by Chicano activists and Chicano musicians. The rise of son jarocho from Boyle Heights as a community force, the rise of Chicano alternative music or rock in español — those histories are being written right now and I think that’s really important and I’m looking forward to 10 years from now what views we have backward to this moment.

It’s really easy to talk about — especially for a white secular Jewish guy — to cling to these old stories and I want to call myself out, I wanna check myself and others on it, to say, “What are we not talking about if we keep talking about the 1950s?” I’m talking about the continual inequalities of Latino life in Los Angeles, the continual transformation of the public spaces of Los Angeles, the ongoing patterns of redevelopment.

I also wanted to bring up the role of thrift stores and record collecting in the survival of a lot of this culture.

Physical thrift stores or digital ones like eBay?

Both, I guess.

These days I’m usually pretty target-driven. My first step: EBay. Set up an eBay search. Second step: Set up a Google News alert. And then start looking for the specific thing you’re looking for. Because pre-eBay I would spend a lot of time traveling, a lot of time driving, even flying to thrift stores in neighborhoods where things might be located and it would always be a crapshoot, you know? You might find something you’re looking for and you’d find a lot of things you were not looking for which might not be useful for the project. I find that online searches can be good at helping you target things. Most of the things I’m interested in are not in official archives, in formal archives, and so it’s hard to find them, but eBay can be very, very helpful.

Don’t you worry about the future of these artifacts you write about?

I do. But that’s another difficult question. Institutionalizing it could take on all kinds of different shapes. We’re just starting at USC to think more about this in terms of Southern California collections. Everyone is getting rid of their records. After I did the Jewish album cover book, that was almost 10 years ago, and to this day I get at least a few emails a year from somebody saying, “I live in blah blah blah and my uncle just died, or my father died and I got a box of Yiddish 78s and I don’t know if I should throw them in the trash or, you know, can I send them to you?” I don’t want them all, though! Part of me always wants to say, “Yeah! Send them to me,” because I do want them all. I want it all in theory, but I don’t want it all in dust and boxes and there’s so much stuff.

And you can’t preserve it all?

We can’t. And so the question becomes: “What do you preserve? And why?” That’s why I think the role of the curator and the role of the archivist, is really tricky.

Music Man Murray, who had a record shop, when he was dying, everyone was trying to figure out what to do with his collection and who would buy it. And I was trying to convince USC to buy it. And we worked really hard to figure out investors, and things, and it became this big question of like, “Well, its 400,000 objects. Where are we going to put that?” To buy that is actually the cheap part. The expensive part is long-term storage, digitization, ongoing preservation. It’s super expensive. And then what? We have four warehouses full of 400,000 things. Who’s going to staff it? Would people visit it? Who’s going to index it and do the metadata? These are really important questions.

It’s much harder than the Library of Congress picking 25 films a year to preserve.

It is. But I understand why and I am very sympathetic to that method. My sheet music project with the L.A. Public Library involved working on an archive of 100,000 pieces of sheet music and songbooks and figuring out which 200 of them are the ones that should be in a book and be our primary storytelling devices.

Don’t you feel you’re killing part of history when you choose something over something else?

Oh, I know I am. That’s why in all my projects I am careful to say, “This is not an official version, this is my version, in this book, in this project.” And if you, Gustavo, went and did this, it would be, and should be, a totally different book.

I had to become very comfortable with the inherent failure of all my archivist projects. Even this new book, there’re so many things that aren’t in there and there’re so many different ways of telling this exact same story, it can keep you up at night. It does keep me up at night.

But it really can make you crazy if you worry about it all the time, and then you never write the book.

¤

Gustavo Turner is a writer and photographer in Los Angeles. Instagram: @gustavoturner and Twitter: @eyecantina.

The post The Latin American Wrecking Crew: A Conversation with Josh Kun appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[junker-town]

The Houston Astros started from the bottom, and now they’re World Series champions

The Astros were the butt of baseball’s jokes not that long ago. Now they’re having a whole lot of fun.

LOS ANGELES — The Houston Astros were a joke. A literal punchline to whatever baseball joke you could come up with. They were “The Aristocrats!” of baseball, something you could say at the end of a long, drawn out explanation of utter and total baseball incompetence. Say the word “Astros,” and you would get laughs.

The Houston Astros are World Series champions for the first time in their 56-year history.

It took skill, luck, talent, and smarts, which is what it took for every other championship team before them. The 2017 Astros were an incredible collection of talent. They were found talent, acquired talent, developed talent, and bought talent. They won 101 games in the regular season, and then they won 11 games after that. When future generations look back at the 2017 season, they won’t think, “Now how did that happen?” It makes sense. What with the talent and all.

But I want to talk about how bad they were if that’s okay.

I can’t stop thinking about this.

... not a single, solitary Nielsen household tuned in for as long as a few minutes in any given quarter-hour to watch the Astros lose to the Indians for their 105th defeat of the year.

The Astros pulled a 0.0 Nielsen rating for a regular season game in 2013. A total goose egg. The next year, it happened again. It was possible to sample nearly 600 Houston households and not find a single one that would turn the Astros on for a second. For perspective, note that about four percent of the population believe that lizard people control the government. Five percent believe Paul McCartney has been dead for decades.

Zero percent were willing to watch the Astros on purpose in 2013 or 2014, give or take.

And those people shouldn’t be blamed. The Astros were transcendentally terrible. If you want moving images, here’s a tidy collection. If you want words, oh, there are words. If you want a single video, this will do:

For my money, I’m very much into this kid losing his innocence just to laugh at how horrible the Astros were:

He wasn’t wrong.

The Houston Astros are World Series champions, though. It didn’t take witchcraft or space-age technology. They put out a “QUIET! WE’RE SUCKING TO GET BETTER” sign in front of Minute Maid Park, and they asked for patience, which they couldn’t possibly have expected to get. Then they built the foundation. Then the frame, then the plumbing, a little drywall, and it was up before we had a chance to realize it.

Suddenly, the Astros were a contender. The high draft picks, the deep farm system, and the twists of fate conspired to make them relevant again. But contending teams are a dime a dozen. The Twins made the postseason this year. The Rockies, too. The Angels and Brewers cared about what was going on in September, somehow. Next year, the Marlins, A’s, and Rays might all care about September.

No, the Astros were a contender, a juggernaut, a team with enviable talent stacked upon enviable talent. It’s important to remember how they got that talent.

There were the players who required a lot of losing. The Astros lost 86 games to get George Springer. Tommy Manzella started more games at shortstop for them than anyone else in 2010, and that’s part of how they got Springer. They lost 106 games in 2011 to get Carlos Correa and Lance McCullers. They lost 107 games in 2012 to get Not Kris Bryant, who turned into Ken Giles, who most definitely didn’t close out Game 7.

They lost 111 games in 2014 to almost get Brady Aiken, which is how they ended up with Alex Bregman in a roundabout way, but that was all a huge mess. People are still arguing about it.

They weren’t all nonsensical losing seasons, though. They built players, too. Charlie Morton was someone available to all 30 teams, but only one of them was creative enough to sign him. Dallas Keuchel was a 23-year-old non-prospect, striking out five batters per nine innings in Double-A. He was brought up to the majors because the Astros were that bad. The new guard rebuilt him and turned him into a Cy Young winner.

They bought players. Brian McCann came over because the Yankees wanted to shed payroll, which is inherently funny. Yuli Gurriel was a high-risk investment, and because of his advanced age, that move didn’t have a huge window with which to work. Carlos Beltran and Josh Reddick sure weren’t cheap.

They traded for players. Justin Verlander was the obvious get, but there were more than that. They gave up a strong prospect to get Evan Gattis. They made a lesser deal with the A’s to get Brad Peacock.

Perhaps most importantly, they inherited players from the people who built those 110-loss teams. I keep thinking about Jose Altuve, who was brought up as a sacrificial lamb in 2011, straight from the low minors. Someone from the Bad Astros had to recognize him as a diamond in the rough and follow through with that evaluation, signing him and developing him, and all that. Keuchel was already here and nothing more than a generic organizational arm. A particularly funny one is Marwin Gonzalez, who came over in the Rule 5 Draft the same day in 2012 that GM Jeff Luhnow was officially hired. That’s a heckuva mint to leave on the pillow for the new guys.

It all coalesced into a team of disparate parts that liked each other. They were from all over the globe. The World Series MVP was Connecticut-born to parents from Panama and Puerto Rico. There was Cuba and Puerto Rico and Venezuela and New Mexico, and the Jewish kid from New Mexico really wanted to learn Spanish so he could speak to his teammates from Cuba and Puerto Rico and Venezuela.

This team, the one that rose out of the depths of the deepest, stinkiest compost pile, that was cobbled together and reinvented itself several times over, was the one in place for a city that needed something to distract itself from Hurricane Harvey. There are still people without homes, people who need a car to function, and the damage isn’t completely fixed, not even close.

But everyone can rally around the sports, now. It’s a small token, but it’s an important one. In Houston, everyone was jabbering about the Astros. There were handwritten notes on the menus of restaurants all over town, and there were large, silkscreen signs in front of the hotels. The Nielsen rating was higher than 0.0 this October. Everyone was very much into this team winning for this city.

It took transactions, sleights of hand, unexpected developments. players left over from the last tenants, and talent, talent, talent. Oh, how the Astros had talent. Their star middle infielders were a second baseman who was cross between Bilbo Baggins and Pete Rose, and a shortstop who was a Greek god with puppy dog feet.

They weren’t a joke anymore, an automatic punchline. The 2017 Houston Astros were the best team around, and they went through the Red Sox, Yankees, and Dodgers to get there. That’s 366 combined years of baseball history standing in their way, and the Astros navigated it deftly.

The Astros are World Series champions. If you were around in 2011 or 2012, that still reads weird, right? They were so bad, everyone.

I’d like to bring this to your attention, via Baseball-Reference.com:

What a marvelous collection of faces and names. The first two rode a tandem bike to work every day, but they couldn’t win a World Series. There was Jose Cruz, and Lance Berkman, and Joe Morgan, and Nolan Ryan, and Mike Scott, and Terry Puhl, and Glenn Davis ...

It all led to this team, this one right here. This was the team that did it. The Astros had a secret legacy of pain that started with this 1980 NLCS, in which there were four straight extra-inning games. Can you imagine that stress? You cannot. From there, the Astros biffed it against the ‘86 Mets, and they lost to the White Sox in ‘05. They were incapable of winning in the postseason.

Until they did.

This brings us to the Dodgers, the other side of the tale. The last time they won the World Series, the Astros were as old as the Rockies. Nobody is worried about the Rockies’ legacy of pain. No one is contemplating the championship curse of the Rays.

Which is to say, it’s been a long, long time since the Dodgers have won the World Series.

This is the season in which they did everything right. They built the team that went on the historic run. They traded for the complementary ace at the deadline. They took great pains to make sure they didn’t overwork Clayton Kershaw and strip him down for parts. This was the team with Chris Taylor and Justin Turner batting seven times every inning, somehow.

Let them be an example of how hard it is to win a World Series.

They had everything going for them. They had the money. It was the kind of money that let their Plans A, B, and C fall through, like it was no big deal. They had the talent. They had the brain trust to dig up more talent than they thought they already had. And it still wasn’t enough.

The Dodgers had a plan going into Game 7. They were going to count on the All-Star to start the game. Then they were going to bring in the All-Star to bridge the gap until the next All-Star. It was a fine plan, until the first All-Star messed the bed.

There was no reason for Yu Darvish to face George Springer. That’s not something we needed the benefit of hindsight to complain about; it looked dicey at the time. But it wasn’t the only reason the Dodgers lost the 2017 World Series.

They lost because of absolutely crappy luck, among other things. The Dodgers were 1-for-13 with runners in scoring position, and they left 10 men on base. Some of those outs were hit exceptionally hard. Joc Pederson pounded a grounder that deserved better in the first inning with the bases loaded. Chris Taylor roped a ball that should have been a triple, at least, in the second inning, except it was a flukey double play. Yasiel Puig just missed pitches, fouling them back or popping them up. On another day, he would have been the hero.

On another day, they all would have been the heroes. What we know is this: The Dodgers planned better than any team in modern history. They spent more, and they built the best baseball players they possibly could. They still couldn’t navigate around the tricky obstacle of “Oh, by the way, Yu Darvish is Scott Erickson now.” They couldn’t overcome the classic baseball booby trap of all-your-hitters-hit-it-straight-into-a-mitt. You can spend all the money in the world to create the best team, but baseball can still take your wallet and dump it into a fountain when you aren’t looking.

The Dodgers are proof of that.

The 2017 World Series was a tremendous contest, filled with twists, turns, landmines, and locusts. Game 7 happened to be the most boring of them all, a game with the obvious conclusion telegraphed from the very beginning.

Except it wasn’t that boring because you kept waiting for the ninjas to pop out of the jack-in-the-box. You kept waiting for the blernsball nonsense from Games 2 and 5 to pop up again. It never did.

The Houston Astros are the World Series champs for the first time in their history. Congratulations upon congratulations to them.

Before the game started, the Dodger Stadium PA was playing Drake at 400 decibels, as they do. It wasn’t just any Drake. It was this one:

This video could have been a five-minute loop of the butt slide. Or the quintuple-error that captured our imagination back in 2012. Instead, it was a standard hip-hop video with Brian McCann and/or Evan Gattis.

And while it was supposed to fire up the Dodgers, ostensibly, it reminded the Astros of where they came from. Dallas Keuchel and Jose Altuve were footnotes on some of the worst baseball teams in history. Now they’re champions, actual World Series champions, because they persevered and everyone got a lot smarter around them.

The Houston Astros used to be funny. Trust me, really, really funny. Now they’re a model franchise, and they have the championship that previous iterations couldn’t figure out. The ‘90s/’00s had two inner-circle Hall of Famers, and the supporting cast wasn’t too shabby, either. The ‘70s had some of the most underrated players in baseball history, with Jimmy Wynn and Cesar Cedeno. The ‘80s had Nolan Ryan and Mike Scott and some fantastic chances.

This was the team that did it, though. It came with the backdrop of a city trying to rebuild, trying to shake everything off. This was a city with “Fuck it, try again” as an unofficial motto. They don’t have to try again. The Houston Astros are World Series champions for the first time in franchise history. I’m not going to say they deserved it, because deserve’s got nothing to do with it. But it was long overdue.

It was long overdue and well-timed. The Astros are champions, even though they were a blight on baseball, a complete embarrassment, just three years ago. They started from the bottom and now, well, you know. Smart teams don’t have to succeed.

This one did. The 2017 Astros won the World Series. You’ve seen the Sports Illustrated cover predicting it. It’s real now. The message for the rest of baseball is this: If they can do it in just a few years, buddy, your team can definitely do it.

That’s a lesson that doesn’t have to be applied in 2018. Or 2048. It’s a universal lesson, and there’s no better example than the Astros. They were so bad. So, so, so bad. Now they’re the champions, and they’re carrying a city on their shoulders.

I remember the butt-slide. I remember the multiple errors on one hilarious play. But it all led to this. The Astros are World Series champions. It seemed like an obvious possibility before the season. It seemed unthinkable just a couple years ago. But it’s here, and it’s glorious.

.

[yahoo-big-league-stew-blog]

ALDS preview: Astros vs. Red Sox is a battle of two potent teams

This American League Division Series between the Houston Astros and the Boston Red Sox might have it all — a top-flight pitching matchup, an MVP candidate, a Cy Young candidate, fun-to-watch young stars and two division champs who could very well go on an October run.

But this is step one. The Astros and Red Sox meet for as many as five games beginning Thursday. We’ll see Justin Verlander and Chris Sale in Game 1. We’ll see Jose Altuve the entire series, showing us why he might just be the most valuable player in the AL. We’ll see Carlos Correa and Mookie Betts and Andrew Benintendi and Alex Bregman.

These are two teams who pitch well and have varying strengths on offense, but they’ve managed to turn them into successful seasons. The Red Sox won 93 games for their second straight AL East title and the Astros finished with 101 games after being the best team in baseball for a good stretch this season.

Only one is going to advance, though and pretty soon, we’ll find out who that is.

SCHEDULE Game 1: Thursday, Oct. 5, in Houston, 4 p.m. ET (TV coverage on MLB Network) Game 2: Friday, Oct. 6, in Houston, 2 p.m. ET (Fox Sports 1) Game 3: Sunday, Oct. 8, in Boston, 2:30 p.m. ET (FS1) Game 4*: Monday, Oct. 9, in Boston, time TBD (FS1) Game 5*: Wednesday, Oct. 11, in Houston, time TBD (FS1) *if necessary

PREVIOUSLY The Red Sox and Astros met seven times this season with Houston having the slight edge. The series was 4-3 Astros, with a 35-22 total score. One of those series will be fresh in the mind of everybody involved �� unfortunately for the Red Sox. The Astros ended their season in Boston, taking three of four at Fenway Park. That included a 12-2 win on Sept. 28, plus two one-run wins. The Red Sox did win on the second-to-last day of the season with Drew Pomeranz, their Game 2 starter, on the mound.

The other meeting between these two came in Houston in mid-June. The Red Sox won two of three at Minute Maid Park. It’s worth noting that aside from that 12-2 Astros win and a 7-1 Red Sox win, these two have played each other pretty close. Four of their games were decided by one run.

(AP)

PITCHING Game 1: Chris Sale (17-8, 2.90 ERA) at Justin Verlander (15-8, 3.82) Game 2: Drew Pomeranz (17-6, 3.32) at Dallas Keuchel (14-5, 2.90) Game 3: TBA Game 4: TBA Game 5: TBA

The Astros-Red Sox matchup will give us the best starting pitching matchup of the division-series round, a Game 1 duel between Sale and Verlander, two former AL Central aces who have been quite good in their new homes.

Sale’s story, you’re probably familiar with now. He was traded from the White Sox to the Red Sox last winter and put together a Cy Young-quality year in Boston. He hasn’t faced the Astros this season. Verlander, meanwhile, was traded from the Tigers to the Astros at the end of August and has looked fantastic in his new digs. Verlander, 34, had an ERA of 1.06 in five starts since joining the Astros.

Game 2 also looks good with former Cy Young winner Keuchel facing Pomeranz, but after that, these two have some questions. Neither team has revealed their plans for Game 3 and beyond. The Red Sox have a Cy Young winner waiting too — Rick Porcello, but his stats (11-17, 4.65 ERA) aren’t what they were last year when he won the award. The Red Sox also have Doug Fister, who has revived his career there in recent months. On Houston’s side, Brad Peacock is underrated and Charlie Morton has been better than most people realize. Lance McCullers Jr., who was good in stretches for the Astros, will most likely come out of the bullpen.

Where Boston holds an advantage is its bullpen. Its 3.15 ERA was second best in baseball this season, behind only the Cleveland Indians. Houston ranked 17th with a 4.27 ERA.

Jose Altuve is an MVP candidate this season and might be the key to Houston’s October. (AP)

THREE KEYS FOR HOUSTON • Keep hitting: Yes, this is very, very obvious, but the Astros would do well to hit the ball and score runs. Now, you can say that about every team in baseball, but the Astros? Offense is their thing. You may not think of them as a Blue Jays-a-couple-years-ago type of juggernaut, but they scored the most runs in MLB this season and had the most hits. They’re also second in the league in homers. The Astros have a long lineup in which pretty much every player is dangerous. They were built to avoid a postseason slump. They just need to keep doing what got them here.

• Figure out Game 3: Game 3 feels like the wild card here. The Red Sox are probably gonna send out Porcello, who hasn’t pitched like the same guy who won a Cy Young last year. The Astros are probably gonna call on Brad Peacock, who isn’t a huge name but was quietly crucial. If the Astros can line up well for Game 3 — whether it’s Peacock or someone else — it could be pivotal for this series, especially if Sale beats them in Game 1.

• Get the most out of their starters: Houston’s strong suit isn’t its bullpen. The Astros have some good arms down there, but they’re not the Indians or the Yankees. The advantage the Astros have is that Keuchel and Verlander are both capable of giving Houston eight — maybe even nine — innings in a postseason start. Their relievers, a group that includes Chris Devinski, Luke Gregerson, Will Harris and closer Ken Giles, can get the job done, but the Astros would be better served to do it with starting pitching.

Boston Red Sox’s David Price reacts after striking out Houston Astros’ George Springer to retire the side with the bases loaded in the seventh inning of a baseball game in Boston, Saturday, Sept. 30, 2017. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

THREE KEYS FOR BOSTON • Who’s your Papi? Nowhere might the absence of David Ortiz be more glaring than the postseason. Sure, the Red Sox have a number of great hitters, but Ortiz always seemed to have that bit of October flair that gave the Red Sox hope, even in the bad years. Well, he’s gone. And the Red Sox need someone to step up as their clutch performer. Big Papi’s shoes will never been filled, but to get through October, you gotta find some magic. Mookie Betts? Andrew Benintendi? Rafael Devers? Who’s it going to be?

• Early leads are their friend: As we’ve already said, the Red Sox have a bullpen advantage. We’ve seen this time and time again in the postseason — get a lead and lean on your relievers. For the Red Sox, that’s bullpen ace Craig Kimbrel, but also set-up man Addison Reed and two more recent weapons. David Price looks to be coming out of the pen for Boston in the postseason, since he’s not stretched out enough to start after an elbow injury. There’s also Carson Smith, who has been impressive in a small sample this year, returning to the Red Sox in September after Tommy John surgery. There’s a lot of potential there to limit the Astros in late innings if they can grab a lead.

• Use Price Right: We just talked about him, but he’s worth a second bullet point. David Price is one of the most fascinating people in this series. If the Red Sox can turn him into an Andrew Miller-type weapon to use in high-leverage situations, it makes their gameplan much more dynamic — particularly against a loaded Astros lineup. John Farrell can’t stick to tradition here. Use Price in big moments and let your back-end guys do their jobs later.

The Astros are a home-run hitting squad. The Red Sox are not. (AP)

FIVE IMPORTANT NUMBERS • 0.00 — That’s Chris Sale’s postseason ERA. Not because he’s great, because he’s never pitched in the postseason. We’ve seen the pressure of October gobble up good pitchers before, so it’s not a sure thing that Sale will dominate like he did in the regular season.

• 70 — The difference in homers this season between the Astros (238, No. 2 in MLB) and the Red Sox (168, No. 27 in MLB). Big advantage Astros there.

• 102 — Stolen bases allowed by the Astros, which ranks fifth in MLB. They’re a strong, well-rounded team, but one area they don’t excel is controlling the run game. Boston, meanwhile, is pretty good at stealing bases. Their offense ranked sixth overall this season.

• .381 — Jose Altuve’s career batting average against Sale (8-for-21). He’s the only Astros with a .300 average against Sale (which not many people anywhere have). Next highest is George Springer at .250.

• 1.46 — Pomeranz’s ERA against the Astros this season, his best against any team he faced more than once. In two starts, he allowed just two earned runs over 12 innings. If the Red Sox can take Game 1 and Pomeranz can dominate the Astros again in Game 2, Boston would go home very happy.

More MLB coverage from Yahoo Sports:

– – – – – –

Mike Oz is the editor of Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at mikeozstew@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @MikeOz

[kickstarter-promotion]

Another Amazing Kickstarter (Double D Farm and Ranch by Nicole Pono Correa —Kickstarter) has been published on http://crowdmonsters.com/new-kickstarters/double-d-farm-and-ranch-by-nicole-pono-correa-kickstarter/

A NEW KICKSTARTER IS LAUNCHED:

Aloha!  At Double D Farm and Ranch L.L.C. we are a small Hawaiian family owned business that is doing our best to preserve our culture while providing the best food we can for the state. Our true goal of the business is to introduce people to farm life through educational classes and hands on opportunities. We also plan to be a working farm and ranch meaning that we will still sell our products at farmers markets and hopefully restaurants. 

Though there are many farms and ranches in this small state, over 90% of our food comes in by barge. We would like to change that through the increase production of food at the ranch.  We also think it’s important for everyone to play a role in sustainability which is why we provide education.  We have a diversified ranch consisting of chickens, sheep, geese, a duck and horses. We plan to add pigs, goats and Lo Line Angus cows to the mix as soon as we are able. We will also be growing native Hawaiian plants including taro (kalo), breadfruit (ulu), sugar cane (ko) and banana (mai‘a). 

We will use the different species and breeds of animals to provide hands on educational classes for anyone who is interested. We have started contacting after school programs first and would like to extend to birthday parties and girl/boy scouts next. We will allow students to raise their 4-H animals on property as well.  This is very beneficial for students who may not live on the countryside but want to participate in the 4-H program.  We want to teach children the importance of taking care of their animals and giving back so instead of charging them a large fee, they will get a low rate and will have to help on the ranch at least once a week. This will not only help us and the animals but it will teach those students confidence, social skills and livestock handling abilities.  We are open and willing to work with just about any and everyone.  Our biggest reservations are currently the lack of bathrooms on property.  Other than that, we will be open and accommodating.  If you want to learn, we will figure out the best way to teach you for your own learning style.    

We believe that education is SO important because in this world where some have never even gotten to see a cow in real life, they also don’t see the farmer checking on their animals in the pouring rain or sitting out in the dark with an animal through the night when that animal gets sick. They don’t see the farmer looking for the one missing sheep on Christmas Day in order to ensure that she is healthy. We can say that we have done those things for our livestock even knowing that those animals may be used for food one day.  We want people to feel like they can talk to their farmer and know that these animals are being properly taken care of by people who are extremely educated on animal handling and welfare.  As Temple Grandin has said “I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we’ve got to do it right. We’ve got to give those animals a decent life and we’ve got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect.” We want to instill those same values into all of our visitors.   

Another educational service we have is we provide sheep leasing for clearing land, keeping land clear, fertilizing and to give people the opportunity to “try out” sheep ownership. Owning livestock is a big deal that most people don’t realize. In order to properly care for your livestock, you need to be educated on all of the things that make that animal healthy and happy including hoof care, parasite control, grooming and nutrition. When people lease sheep, we take care of the animal for them while teaching them all of the things they will need to do as owners to care for that sheep over time. They can then decide if they would like to purchase any animals or if sheep ownership isn’t for them. In some cases, people want to continue to lease animals but not buy and we also provide that service for them as well. 

Along with education and food production, we want to provide jobs for locals that would allow them a living wage.  We want to have them go home to say that they are proud of the work they are doing at the ranch and learning on the job so that they can produce their own food in their own homes as well. 

We have so many goals and aspirations that it is hard to list them all here.  What we do know is that we want to help provide a sustainable living environment and education for the people living here and any visitors who would like to come see us.  We want to make this ranch a place where people feel comfortable in nature and around animals.   

Some of the things we need help with are:

Renting a bobcat for a week $1000 in order to clear up the overgrowth of invasive trees, allowing for us to grow grass for our animals

Fencing materials $1000 in order to provide multiple pastures for the animals so that we can set up a rotational grazing system and allow our animals to be completely grass fed 

Buying an office trailer to work out of which will include a compost toilet for our guests estimated $25,000 including delivery

Buying 2 shipping containers for animal feed, storage of supplies and materials, estimated $7000 including delivery and set up

Setting up an agricultural structure that will allow us to teach in different weather conditions and provide a comfortable sitting area for students $45,000

Though these numbers may seem daunting, we know that every penny makes the difference and thankful for any donation, big or small.  Every step forward is still a step forward whether it is at a walk or a run.  

INFORMATION PROVIDED BY Kickstarter.com and Kicktraq.com VISIT PAGE SOURCE

[yahoo-big-league-stew-blog]

Mike Schmidt wouldn't build around a player who speaks Spanish

Philadelphia Phillies legend Mike Schmidt is an inner-circle Hall of Famer, a third baseman who smacked 548 homers, won three NL MVP awards and led his team to the 1980 World Series title.

He doesn’t sound like he’d be much of a general manager, though.

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The 67-year-old Schmidt said on Tuesday that he wouldn’t build a team around current Phillies headliner Odubel Herrera because, before anything else, he isn’t a native English speaker.

Here’s Schmidt on the 94WIP show (via CBS Philly) after being asked if Herrera is the type of player he would build a team around:

“My honest answer to that would be no because of a couple of things. First of all, it’s a language barrier. Because of that, I think he can’t be a guy that would sort of sit in a circle with four, five American players and talk about the game. Or try and learn about the game or discuss the inner workings of the game. Or come over to a guy and say, ‘Man, you gotta run that ball out.’ Just can’t be — because of the language barrier — that kind of a player.”

So, applying Schmidt’s own logic to the team-building process he’d also take a pass on building a team around — off the top of my head — Roberto Clemente, Miguel Cabrera, Manny Ramirez or Ichiro.

Just because English wasn’t their strong suit.

Schmidt’s thinking ignores convenient facts like 1) WAR and slash lines being a universal language or 2) the diverse nature of baseball means there will always be other teammates around who speak your language and might be in need of a batting tip or  ‘no bueno‘ after slagging it down the line. The Phillies have more than their fair share of Hispanic players on the roster.

(It’s here that I should also point out no one ever docks English-only players for not being able to speak with their Spanish or Japanese-speaking teammates in the clubhouse.)

Mike Schmidt has opinions on Odubel Herrera. (Getty Images)

Now, there are valid reasons to believe that Herrera isn’t the cornerstone the Phillies believe him to be after handing him a six-year, $30 million contract extension. The 25-year-old’s start to the 2017 season has been poor: Two months of severe slumping followed by a recent rebound at the plate.

You also wouldn’t put him in the class of the game’s other young stars:  The Mike Trouts, Bryce Harpers, Kris Bryants, Manny Machados and Carlos Correas of the league.

And Schmidt, to his credit, said as much:

“Odubel can be — you see what he’s doing the last three days and we saw the inconsistency that dropped his batting average all the way down to the low .200’s prior to the last three games, and that’s really the first time we’ve seen that kind of inconsistency from him.

But not before devolving back into more weird territory on how Herrera’s more enthusiastic approach to the game apparently disqualifies him from being part of a championship core.

“However, he’s more of a sort of, play the game, allow his exuberance for the game to kind of spread around the team. I think the fans love him. He’s not afraid to do things that sort of irk the other team if you will, and you know what that is. I probably would hate him if I played against him because of his antics on the field, but he’s not afraid. He’s not afraid to do that. He’s learning to play a really good centerfield. They haven’t figured out where he needs to hit in the batting order yet.

OK, so that quote is a bit confusing. Apparently Herrera’s bat flipping, which isn’t that unique on major league diamonds, is a drawback. But it’s also a positive? Or something?

Just where do you stand, Mike?

“To answer your question, those are the reasons that I don’t think you can build a team around him. Now, I truly think he can hit second or first on a championship team. There’s no question about that.”

Well, glad that’s settled.

But wait, there was more!

“To build a team around a guy he has to sprint every ball out like Chase Utley used to do. Be more of, I wanna say, a friend of every … not that he’s not a friend, it’s hard to describe what I mean. The language barrier means a lot because his communication with his teammates is limited because of the language barrier. So I don’t think I’m disrespecting him by any means. But when you say build a team around somebody you’re generally talking about a Roy Halladay as a pitcher, Cliff Lee, you’re talking about a Mike Trout kind of player. Players that, you know, are automatic All-Stars every year. So, um, I think an Aaron Altherr can become that kind of guy. Uh, you know, I think as Tommy Joseph learns and gets better and becomes a 30 home run, 100 RBI player … We got some young players in the minor leagues that could eventually become those kinds of players … um, but um, am I answering your question?

The audio is really something because you can tell Schmidt seems to recognize he’s stepping in something, but can’t stop himself from digging a deeper hole.

As you can imagine, Schmidt’s comments elicited quite a reaction — many people thought he was totally out of the line and some others defended him. By Tuesday afternoon, Schmidt released a statement half-way apologizing for what he said. He said he was sorry that a “misrepresentation of my answer occurred,” which isn’t exactly the same thing as owning the blame.

Mike Schmidt apologizes for comments about Odubel Herrera

“Im very sorry”#Phillies⚾️ pic.twitter.com/5eIT4y2ZTI

— John Clark CSN/NBC (@JClarkCSN) June 6, 2017

He also reportedly called Herrera and apologized for his comments.

Odubel Herrera said Mike Schmidt called to apologize for comments he made on WIP.

— Todd Zolecki (@ToddZolecki) June 6, 2017

Before Tuesday night’s game, Herrera told reporters that he and Schmidt had no problems, but he didn’t quite agree with the assessment. From CSN Philly’s Jim Salisbury:

“I don’t agree with his comments, but I respect him as a player,” Herrera said. “I know he’s one of the greatest Phillies players of all time, but I don’t agree with his comments.

“It is disappointing because you never want to hear negative comments, but he called me, he apologized, and explained what happened. Everything is good. It’s really not as big of a deal that people are making it sound like.”

Look, anyone who was around for the Phillies last run of success should be able to realize that sustained success doesn’t come from building around just one player, but from a strong core of team-developed talent that hails from all corners.

Who is Ryan Howard without Jimmy Rollins, Shane Victorino, Cole Hamels and Carlos Ruiz, a Spanish-speaker who’s revered for his leadership in the streets of Philly?

The Phillies may struggle to put championship-caliber talent around Herrera during the life of his contract, but it will have nothing to do with the language he prefers or how he circles the bases after a home run.

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