The Littlest Postmamboist Celebrity Model!

HBO *Treme* Brings Postmamboism to Instanbul and Turkey

HBO Treme's Music Supervisor in Instanbul.  He is now returned to the U.S. and working on the music for Season 2.

Who Wears Postmamboism?

This spiff, sharp gentleman from Seattle, flosses Postmamboism at the 34th meeting of WisCon, the premiere feminist sf/f convention.

Harlem's Afro-Cuban Renaissance PLUS Postmamboism!

From Larry Blumenfeld, and the Village Voice:

"This music has gone underground," Sanabria laments later, between sets. "But I remember when there were 30 different clubs in this city where you could go and hear some mixture of Afro-Cuban tradition and New York jazz." Sanabria, who grew up in the Fort Apache section of the South Bronx, found inspiration back then from such standard-bearing first-generation players as Tito Puente and trumpeter Mario Bauzá. Sanabria teaches at both the Manhattan School of Music and the New School, and he treats the stage as one more classroom: He pauses halfway through one set to acknowledge the name chosen by Bauzá and his brother-in-law, singer and frontman Frank "Machito" Grillo, for their legendary orchestra: Afro-Cubans. "That was an early nod to Africa," he notes, "before it was in fashion." Tonight, Sanabria's own nod is overt and visible: In place of his usual jacket and tie, he wears a black T-shirt emblazoned with, in red, a Kongo cross and the phrase Abre/Kuta/Güiri/Mambo—Kikongo for, very liberally interpreted, "Word up."


The whole band wears the shirts. So does Ned Sublette, the musician and writer holding court at a table nearby, as is his custom nearly every Wednesday night, surrounded by stacks of the T-shirts he designed and copies of his authoritative book, Cuba and Its Music. Both are expressions of what Sublette calls "postmamboism"—"a portable theory that places music at the center of understanding" and "begins with the study of African diaspora musics," as he has explained in a post on BoingBoing.net. "Not deconstruction, not postcolonialism, not subaltern studies, not semiotics itself can boast of a triumph to rival the Postmamboism T-shirt," Sublette writes me in an e-mail.

For Sanabria, the fashion statement just fits: "It means what we say musically: This has deep roots, and it calls for an open mind."

By the way, for those in the know, they have noticed that HBO's Treme is Postmamboist, totally!

Houston iFest, Plus Postmambosim

Vaquero, he goes there, yes!  Sings, plays guitar, reads and signs books, plus a bit of Postmamboism

Houston and me have always gotten along well. Next Friday (Apr 16) at 7 p.m. I'll be doing a book reading / signing with some songs at Sig's Lagoon,  3710 Main, Houston, TX. http://www.sigslagoon.com/events/?event_id=8

Then at 10:30 that same night, I move next door to Shoeshine Charlie's Big Top Lounge for a full set of music by me and my guitar.

The next two days, Saturday and Sunday, I'll be appearing at Houston's iFest -- a Texas-size two-weekend outdoor world music festival. http://www.ifest.org/complete-schedule/ I'll be at 4:30 Saturday (17) at the H-E-B cultural stage, dropping some Postmamboism and maybe playing a little, and will also do a book signing. Later that afternoon, when I'm off duty, three of my faves are up against each other on three different stages:

Joe Ely, Brave Combo, and Bachata Roja Legends, so I'll have to deal it out carefully. The following day (18) i'm back at the H-E-B stage at 2:30.

That day's attractions include Mighty Diamonds, Eddie Palmieri, New Orleans  rapper Truth Universal, and Marcia Ball.

(The weekend after is ridiculous -- the fest closes with King Sunny and P-Funk -- but I'll be back in Noo Yawk.)

More about San Francisco soon, but it's gonna be special.

And the new Postmamboism T-shirts really really are coming, soon . . .

The Texas Board of Education Strikes Again Against Education

We can expect that Texas high schools won't be taking the Postmamboist approach to history anytime soon.


Among the many counter-historical factual implementations of The Texas Board of Education as to what can and cannot be in their state's textbooks, they also forbade inclusion of Spanish-speaking people and the histories of them -- and presumably how they came to be a part of the U.S. population in the first place -- from history textbooks. One of the minority opposing members of the board had to leave the process over this, she was so disturbed because, to paraphrase her, "They want the history of the U.S. to be all white people, all English speakin, only."

The Texas Board of Education also hates Jefferson because he was anti-capitalist.  It's cognitive dissonance to the max, sharing a Jefferson hate with people I despise. My reasons for the hatred are very different -- for the reasons they probably approve of Jefferson -- it's because he did approve of inter and intra state slave trade, among other reasons.

This reminds all over again why Texas was never an option as a place to base myself when younger.

In the meantime, at UCLA, Himself the Vaquero's there because of the English - Comp Lit Graduate Dept., which is sponsoring this symposium, Ports of Call -- Cultures of Exchange.

He's giving a keynote address at noon today, California time, on the history of Cadiz and the New World ports of Havana and New Orleans -- the Spanish connection, and all that means, including the African.

The Dept. Chair is of Tunisian background, and the whole grad dept. slants strongly to Middle eastern literature. But if you're kid growing up in Texas you won't even know this nation has loads of voters whose relatives came from these other countries. They may well not know these other countries even exist -- the Middle East is Israel, Palestine and 'Arabs.' Soon even Iraq and Afghanistan will fall off the primary media radar too, as the situations there drag ever on.

It sux evermore to be U.S., doesn't it?

At least tomorrow an amiga and I will go to Church uptown and hear some great music.

In the meantime it storms wind and rain.

This Is Why Academia Needs Postmamboism

Someone needs to inform Brian Reed, MA/Ph.D. program at the University of Washington, of Postmamboism. It could cheer him immensely, providing a whole new perspective for scholarly work post Postmodernism.

(3) The theory canon seems to have closed, a little like the opera canon, or Scripture. I finished my Ph.D. in 2000, the same year that Hardt and Negri's Empire was published. Since then, judging at least by these 520 files, no new name has emerged that has rock star-like charisma or widely-worshipped intellectual oomph. You hear a great deal about Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Homi Bhabha, Walter Benjamin, Gloria Anzaldua, and other thinkers who were already staples of "Introductions to Literary Theory" courses back in the mid-1990s. Otherwise, the name dropping has become quite field specific. Insofar as one can identify any new profession-wide theoretical trends, they tend to position themselves at the intersections between literary study and psychology or the natural sciences. Arriba trauma studies, affect studies, ecocriticism, and cognitive poetics! Oh, image-text relations are also huge. Generally as a pretext for analyzing The Watchmen, Maus, or Neil Gaiman's Sandman comix. Or to talk about World of Warcraft.

(4) A surprisingly large number of students and professors maintain that we have moved into a new literary period, variously called post-postmodern, post-9/11, or post-ironic. There also appears to be a truly remarkable degree of agreement concerning the Great Books of the present day: Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Blood Meridian, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Thomas Pynchon, too, is cited over and over as the harbinger and presiding genius of the New Period. I've read these books (including all of Pynchon's novels), but I never expected the emergence of such a matter-of-fact way of narrating the present moment in US literature, and I certainly would never have selected such a narrow, narrow cast of characters to represent the 21st century. Heck, this list doesn't even include David Eggers or William Vollman, neither of whom, despite their obvious points of contact with Wallace et al, were mentioned by a single applicant. If advocates of a diverse curriculum don't want to end up fighting old battles all over again, they might want to hurry up and generate a counter- or alternative narrative PDQ. Please! I don't want to have to read twenty more ecofeminist critiques of The Road next year, too.

UCLA gets its first shot of post-Braudelian, Postmamboist perspective tomorrow.

Today Was About Dr. Joseph Roach

Joseph Roach, Yale University: “ The Return of the Last of the Pequots: Disappearance as Performance” (cosponsored by Atlantic Studies, Center for the Humanities).

It was at the CUNY Graduate Center, sponsored by the English Dept. and the Atlantic Studies Dept.  V. was the discussant, 4 PM. free, and open to the public.

Joseph Roach is a performance studies pioneer. Among his books is Cities of the Dead, the splendid study of the street theater of New Orleans: Mardi Gras Indians, second lines, jazz funerals, parades and carnival. Joe's a Postmamboist, also.

It was so interesting.  Dinner and company afterwards was even more so.  An excellent time was had by all.

You know, it's indescribably rich, to be on the faculty of any school here in NYC.  You can walk a few blocks, jump on the subway, and be at any of these forums and conferences and discussions that are held at all these colleges and universities all semester, meeting your peers, talking, getting scholarship and instruction that might take an entire year distilled into a couple of hours or a weekend, and still sleep in your own bed.  Sometimes I become so acutely aware of the cultural value of this city in which I live that I can hardly bear it.

Another Perspective on THE DAY

Postmambo Magic.

Click here!

Plus pic.

Postmamboism

Go to the Chairman's blog, to see the description of the official roll out of Postmambism in academia.

Not to mention, um, the lovely things he says about Vaquero.

With which I agree.  I would, wouldn't I?

Postmamboist Bobby Sanabria Big Band

OBBY SANABRIA BIG BAND

FB LOUNGE 172 E. 106th Street (between Lexington & 3rd Avenue)
NYC, NY 10029 / (212) 348-3929
Every Wednesday / Shows at 7:30 & 9:30pm
$20, $15 w/ student ID or WBGO FM Jazz 88 membership card

Larry Hama, Marvel Cartoonist, Celebrity Postmamboist 003

Postmamboists care about Haitians and Haiti.

Who wears Postmamboism? Larry Hama, that's who, Marvel Cartoonist, writer, band member THE KOTICS.

Postmamboism Has Arrived in Manchester

The Food, Music and Justice blog has gone Postmamboist!

The blog's blog is here.

Apparently the blog's creators are working to make a New Orleans - Manchester connection.

No trackback buttons on the site. It looks to be a subscription kind of thing for music and videos.

Heh. Last night it was Big Sam's Funky Nation at Sullivan Hall. New Orleans and NYC, baby.  A friend was in town who is on the music faculty at Williams & Mary College. She got good and warm. Can't get real like that in Williamsburg. Heh

Who Wears Postmamboism 002?

Vaquero writes:

Here's our new celebrity model [artist, Michael Zwack]. There will be more. If y'all will indulge me, I'm having fun with this . . . though I'm running out of 2XL . . .

To see what Michael Zwack's work looks like when it's been digitized, reduced to a small size, and lit up on a flat screen -- it's very different from seeing the real work -- go to

http://michaelzwack.com/work/gallery/1358

My favorite is

http://michaelzwack.com/work/view/1358/7217

I highly second V.'s idea that you click on the links to get a glimpse of Michael's art.

Who Wears Postmamboism

At some point this year we are hoping to start lines of design made in Haiti, by Haitians. Lots of sequins. Sequins = mirrors, behind which are the faces of the the divine. In the meantime we're working on the second design.

Postmamboism T-Shirts Are In the House

And in the mail!

All those that ordered and delivered payment at the same time are in the mail as of today. Poor guy, in these temperatures, he got all these off at the PO.


Those that are being hand-delivered, that starts tonight -- at the Zinc Bar , where tonight Robby Ameen's quartet is playing jazz on the fusion side. If you don't know who Robby Ameen is, you can google him.

So we have t-shirts, as I was saying. They are handsome.

We Have Orders! We Almost Have T-Shirts! We Have Blizzard!

I'm so sick I can't do much of anything. Vaquero went out to get supplies for us and our sick across-the-hall neighbor. She's been sick in bed 11 days and in sore need of groceries.

The snow has begun.  Thus this is an excellent time to do the administrative chores of Postmamboism T-Shirts.

We at the Institute for Postmambo Studies have been receiving inquiries about our forthcoming T-shirt.

Yes, we will have it by Xmas, though how much before we're not yet sure. Maybe Wednesday the 23rd. Maybe sooner.

In honor of this event we have produced the following press release:

* * *
The Institute of Postmambo Studies says:

Abre kuta güiri mambo -- open your ears and listen to the important matter.

Postmamboism -- the first theoretical discipline with its own clothing line -- announces the impending manufacture of the first Postmamboism T-shirt, in a limited edition of 144, in honor of the December 15, 2009 publication of "Principles of Postmamboism" on boingboing.net.

Printed in Brooklyn to support hometown industry, the Postmamboist motto appears in fiery red on a black Sun brand T-shirt made in Pakistan, where cotton has been cultivated since perhaps 3,000 B.C.


By proudly wearing and above all by purchasing the first Postmamboism T-shirt, you will help the Institute for Postmambo Studies achieve its theoretical goals.


Hand-posted via US mail (or hand-delivered in New York City) by a practicing Postmamboist.


You can pay using PayPal (surcharge of 3% + $0.30), check, or in person (in NYC).


available in S, M, L, XL, XXL


all sizes $19 (except XXLs, which are $20) plus S&H:


S & H within US: $4 per order 1st class USPS; $6 for Priority; within NYC: $5 for delivery, or arrange to pick up (no charge)

quantity discounts available


TO ORDER NOW: send an e-mail to ned.sublette at gmail.com. Tell us:

1. how many T-shirts?

2. what size(s)?

3. 1st class, priority, express (expensive), or hand-delivery (in NYC only) or pickup (NYC only)?


4. Will you pay by PayPal (quickest), check, or in person (NYC only)?

5. What address should we ship to?


A Postmamboist will invoice you promptly.

Postmamboism Rolls Out Live on Vaquero's Boing Boing Guest Blog

Guest blogging on Boing Boing, Ned Sublette rolls out his Vision Theory of Music, Life, History, the Universe and Everything Else, named Postmamboism. It's available here.

Some of you have been provided private viewing of Postmamboist Manifesto's drafts earlier this year.   Now, here it is, complete with logo (designed with an artist friend, who also is a Haitian vodún houngan).

BoingBoing Guest Blogging By Vaquero Begins Today

This first one he introduces himself with a bit from The Year Before the Flood -- Xeni wants him to blog about issues, etc. in the book -- but he plans to do other things as well.

This first one will inclue a link of him reading. Later in the day he'll do another entry which will be photos.

He's thinking of doing perhaps, 3 shorter ones, each day.

Probably he'll also roll out Postmamboism to this larger audience.
We'll see.

At the moment he's having a meeting about bringing los Muñequitos back to the U.S. for a tour, and a meeting about making Postmamboism t-shirts. Very soon the Postmambo Wiki has to go up.