December 2008 Archives

L.A.'s Jewish Journal is calling Bernard Madoff's many Jewish victims "Swindler's List." Turns out not enough people were trucha con el Salvatrucho de Norwalk. Here's the government's version of what happened.

Starting two years ago, advertisements in Spanish language magazines and the internet lured people to invest in a real estate company called Best Diamond Funding (pick up any of these rags and you'll see the easy money schemes, real estate investment deals and the like). The company's offices were in Huntington Park, next to a Christian bookstore. Milton Retana, a native of El Salvador, ran the investment firm. His wife ran the bookstore.

More

Aztec Parrot was in town this weekend. His nombre de pila is Darren de Leon. Back in the day (1997 more or less) his poetry crew (Los Delicados) and mine (The Taco Shop Poets) were the Beatles and Rolling Stones of the Chicano poetry scene. There were no performance groups like ours so the field was wide open to perform at places like San Francisco's Galeria de la Raza, L.A.'s Self Help Graphics and the Nuyorican Poets Café in NYC's Lower East Side.

More

We should be thankful that Woody Allen and Marisela Norte don't drive. Sure, it means they've never lost their car keys, gotten traffic tickets, or vented road rage. But it also means their senses have been freed up and that's fed their prolific storytelling.

Marisela's just published her first book. It's a sampling of three decades-plus of fierce notebook writing on the East L.A. - downtown L.A. buses. She's written poems about drive-by cat calls and about the señoras headed to the west side who have no one at home who'll listen and so spill their lives to their seat mates. And there's Marisela one seat back, notebook open, pen crying ink, thinking, "Ay, no me diga. No pare, sigua, sigua." At an exhibit of her photos earlier this year at Tropico de Nopal, Marisela displayed stacks of these notebooks on a table in the middle of the gallery. Marisela's hybrid cursive-block letter script filled every line, the lives were all there, you could imagine the windowpanes fogging up on those cold winter mornings on that bus.

More

I've been thinking about laundry detergent. If you drive any of the streets of central Los Angeles you're bound to come across a Mexican or Central American market with a sign for Ariel, with its atomic symbol logo. The signs have nothing to do with the Shakespeare character or Jose Enrique Rodo's century-old essay of the same name. Ariel is a Mexican laundry detergent.

More