April 1st poem


Check it. My disclaimer for this. I have a different sleep pattern than everyone else so my day really ends at 5am. I don't care. While you guys are writing during the day at work or home or any other place, I am sleeping. So here is day one. It is in spanish. I wont translate it because it will lose the meaning that the refrain means. So here it is.


Como el Burro a la Carreta

¿Si asi me amas ?
Digo como el burro ama a la carreta
Digo Si el burro no amas a la carreta
¿Asi me quieres?

Digo con el mismo anhelo del odio
Que el burro le tiene a la carreta
¿Asi me amas tu?

¿Pero que sera si el burro
no encuentra oficio sin la carreta?
Si el unico uso de tal burro es
Cagar y jalar su carreta.
Si se lo quita ¿con que se quedara?

Si el asno y el caballo abandonan al pobre burro
Y tu tambien me abandona a tal burro
Y a mi tambien me abandona como el burro que soy
¿A quien carajo le vamos a comer las camizas?

Sreening of award winning documentary:
SANTO DOMINGO BLUES:
Los Tígueres de la Bachata
The Story of Luis Vargas, The Supreme King of Bitterness



Friday July 18th 2008
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery btwn Bleecker and Houston
10pm

$10 at the door and $8 presale if you go to
Click here for presale



Plus FREE after party playing the best Bachata, Merengue, Salsa, and various other Latin grooves

DJ's

Eliel Lucero (Funkworthy FM)
&
Geko Jones (Dutty Artz, Funkworthy FM)

More on the Movie

Santo Domingo Blues


''Santo Domingo Blues'' never lets us forget that bachata is a music of loose hips and tight pants, of spicy lyrics and sexy rhythms. The words may be bitter, but the notes are sweet, and the director, Alex Wolfe, wisely allows the songs to narrate his film. Splicing interviews with lively concert clips filmed in the Dominican Republic and New York, Mr. Wolfe takes us to the cantinas, carwashes, bars and bodegas where bachata thrives.

Without losing sight of the music's essential energy, Mr. Wolfe peppers his film with quietly resonant shots: a restive line at the United States Embassy in Santo Domingo, a monstrous pile of discarded beer bottles behind a house in Santa María. The Dominican poor and bachata are never far apart.

But for Mr. Vargas, the king of bachata, poverty is in the past. The proud owner of a new recording studio and luxury hotel, Mr. Vargas has clearly traveled far from his humble beginnings in Santa María, where his father still lives. In one of those wonderful, stumbled-upon moments that speak volumes, we watch Mr. Vargas prepare for a Santiago concert by spraying himself liberally with Banana Republic cologne before confessing how little his wealth means to him. ''Money can't buy the love of a woman,'' he tells his rapturous audience. But, of course, he has come far enough to know that it can.
- Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times

Ry Who-der? Alex Wolfe's documentary Santo Domingo Blues adroitly traces a noble history of bachata—a formerly ignoble Dominican musical form—while feeling intimate all the same. Warm'n'fuzziness is lent by the genre's impossibly humble and genial "Supreme King," Luis Vargas, our guide from Santiago and Santa Maria to South Williamsburg. Bachata is quintessential Quisqueyana, but wasn't always so. Bachateros were maligned for years by the D.R.'s upper crust for playing "musica del bajo mundo" ("underground music," one among other less euphemistic terms), and ridiculed by some D.R.-to-N.Y. transplants for making "crybaby music," bachata being thematically infused with lost love and unresolvable bitterness. But hey, bitterness is contagious, and so is the music's sugary three-chord twinkle. Wolfe's anecdotal musicology succeeds precisely because of its bare-bones, bawdy yet beautiful approach—just like the music Vargas makes.
- Pete L'Official, Village Voice

Few films about music explain a style as well as "Santo Domingo Blues," a documentary about Dominican bachata by Alex Wolfe. Its focus is Luis Vargas, one of the most successful practitioners of this back-country, working-class music about heartbreak and jealousy. (It is largely driven by clean, staccato acoustic guitar picking and light-voiced singing, with the insistent scrape of a metal guiro in the background.) The film shows where he grew up in the Dominican Republic; his current wealth (he owns a recording studio and hotel, with a gold disc framed on every guest's door); his gigantic shows back home; and his whirlwind tours through the Dominican neighborhoods of New York, where he sometimes plays three gigs a night. Mr. Vargas is both proud of and beset by the perception of bachata as low-class music. At the same time, its deep sentiment makes Dominican immigrants pine for their own country, especially at Christmastime; New Yorkers in particular ought to see the film, because they will learn about where they live.
- Ben Ratliff, New York Times

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Out Now!"/>

So it’s my first week as a partially employed person. I don’t know what to do yet. I don’t know what to write yet. I guess I just thought that working would fall right into place and all but not as easy as I thought it would be. It’s a bit more complicated right now.

My thoughts are flooded and I am restless. I can’t sit for more than ten minutes at a time. I am only working 2 days a week during the days. I still have various evening engagements. Some paid.

I have the new bi-weekly DJing gig that is giving me a good small chunk of cashola. If anyone is around, I’m at Manahatta which is at 310 Bowery between Bleecker and Houston from the hours of 6:30pm to 10:30pm.

Everything else is various at best.

I am making enough money to pay bills and a little on top of that, but its situations like this that make me happy to work at a bar. I get to drink cheap and that helps things.

Urban Word mentoring helps the pocket as well but I am almost done with regular workshops for the season. The summer is not a busy time over at Urban Word.

What I do know is that I don’t want to return to regular work. I don’t want a regular day job at least. Maybe a few more nightlife gigs would be nice. Bartending or DJing or something along those lines. I am exhausted of Day Jobs or full time jobs that bring no type of satisfaction to me. Maybe I should have gone to college if that were the case but I didn’t. I’m 27 and I’ve been working 6 to 7 days a week for the last 10 years. Now I have a total of 4 days a week where I am not really working for someone else.

With this time I want to really work on my own stuff. Be it poetry or music or promoting or making deals and having a regular hustle, this is what I want to do. Find a way to make money while working on my arts.

I’m fortunate to have enough money to pay bills without falling behind, and I am fortunate to have a girlfriend who is supporting me during this confusing time.

I’m happy yet terrified.

Today is day one.

Tomorrow I will work. Wednesday I should have off but I have to make up a few hours.

Friday I don’t know what to do.
I’ll figure it out though.
Writing prompts would be great right now Send them to me if you can. Please.

That’s it for now.

Angola is a country littered with land mines. People still trip on them and live, without a limb usually.
So this beauty pageant was made to uplift some of the survivors. Survivors indeed, living through a land mine is massive.


I hate beauty pageants a whole lot. I don't like them at all. Besides the fact that I find them horribly boring, The woman who win usually don't seem any type of interesting. The Miss Universe Pageant have turned into an Olympic/world cup type of event, everyone rooting for their country. I still remember how happy I was to find out that Miss Dominican Republic won a few years back. We are a tiny country in this world and winning shit on a world platform just makes me happy.
Besides the fact that the girl who won is like 6'5" and is the niece of my favorite musician, Juan Luis Guerra.

Anyway I heard about this pageant in Angola a few months ago, and didn't pay it much mind because it was still in discussion not in action. Well this morning, on the BBC, I hear about the first Miss Land Mine 2008. Hearing the joy in the Portuguese tongue, of a woman who lost her leg, who wont wear the prosthetic because it is too heavy, who feels beautiful, who should constantly be reminded that she is beautiful.

http://www.miss-landmine.org/misslandmine_news.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7315448.stm