August 2009 Archives

At MOCA, L.A.'s poetry old-guard held out the torch to the young bucks and said... psych!

It was youth's night at the museum's auditorium several weeks ago. That's what the young poets said. Then Luis Alfaro stepped up to the podium, saying he had inaugurated some of the first poetry readings at the museum in the early 1990s and that he was there to represent the youth. Some of the night's poets weren't in kindergarten when Luis first read at MOCA.

Luis's poem sped the audience into the driveways and crashed through the fences of his Pico-Union, Mexican/Chicano upbringing and reminded you why he's decided to write plays for a living. His poem ended with a shaving of the mustache that reminded him of his Mexican father.

19 year-old Dante Mitchell threw down a poem that zipped the audience from "gangsta Bush," to women's basketball, to mother's angel eyes. Dante's a recent high school graduate who's cut his teeth in the Leimert Park scene with Project Blowed. Dante and several of the other poets who read at MOCA credited L.A.'s Mike the Poet with inspiring them to write and perform.

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Six year-old Nathan Zamora is mad at his dad. Both are soccer fans. Nathan cheered for Mexico. His father, Juan Zamora, rooted for the U.S. saying it played more cohesively as a team, not as a group of individual, prima donna soccer stars.

Juan wants me to know he's not a Malinchista, the reference to the ultimate traitor in Mexican culture: La Malinche, the indigenous woman who translated for Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes and became his lover. He's from Mexico City, Juan adds, a metropolis with four (Right? America, Pumas, Cruz Azul and Atlante) professional soccer teams.

The Zamoras: Juan, his wife, and four kids took in the game at Guelaguetza restaurant in L.A.'s Koreatown. The kids did a good job of keeping the mole off their clothes, Nintendos, and cel phones. And Juan stayed cool as Mexico shut out top U.S. forward (and L.A. Galaxy star) Landon Donovan and beat the U.S. two goals to one.

Guelaguetza is huge. For nine years it has occupied a former Chinese restaurant near the corner of Olympic and Normandie. The high end mezcal and the michelada beers were flowing and the tacos de chapulines crackled in the molars.

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