La ciudad sin gente by ~LuMaGa on deviantART

What I’m really diggin from this visual art piece is how it’s the city without people but not an empty city. Silhouettes in the widows, buildings leaning on each other and the critter running unchecked (and pretty damn happy about it) through the streets. Reminds me of walking through the City late at night or just after a deep snowstorm as most folks take refuge in their apartments. Me, I would be the one walking around and trying to notice the details that slip by as you’re rushing from place to place.

Example: While I was living in Brooklyn (Bedstuy, Do or Die) I was able to see the constellation of Orion on a pretty frequent basis. This meant I had to actually pause while walking down Franklin Ave and take a long hard look at the sky. Maybe not the wisest idea as shady characters were out and about at all hours of the night doing whatever business it is to do at 2am on Eastern Parkway. So, yeah, the expected norm is to get from the train station to your crib in a straight line; if you do see people, don’t look em in the eye; don’t look away but also don’t try to grill anyone, either. That’s the norm and here I am taking time to actually plot the stars, note that Orion is right over Medgar Evers College and ponder what that might mean. Which made me look either extremely brave, downright foolish or quasi-mystical, like said critter above.

Manong Al Robles
Originally uploaded by geminipoet

Barb has started her tenure at the Harriet Blog with a post celebrating the life, activism and poetry of Manong Al Robles.

San Francisco Poet Al Robles (1930-2009)

Al Robles was an activist, at the forefront of the movement to stop the demolition of the I-Hotel, which housed elderly and low income tenants, many of whom we’ve come to know as the “Manongs,” elder Filipino Americans, or Pinoys, who spent their youths as migrant labor in West Coast agriculture and canneries, and as US veterans who fought in WWII. He brought young activists and artists to Agbayani Village in Delano, a rural settlement of these Manongs, and to the WWII Japanese American internment camps at Tule Lake and Manzanar. He believed it was important for young activists and artists to see these places with their own eyes, to hear the stories of these places firsthand. Robles’s activism was closely tied to his poetic work; in fact, his activism and poetry were one and the same. He believed poets should bring themselves into the world.

Complete article is here.

Manong Al’s passing was sudden and intense. You could feel the vacuum in the community as the question (spoken and unspoken) came around again: Who will tell our stories now?

Then, just as fast, I could see folks like Tony Robles and Kuya Phil start to be called Manong by the community.

And that was just like Al’s poetry, rolling like a stream over a rock, nature moving through and creating change. With Al’s jazz meter, his steady cadence, unflappable stage presence, improvisational abilities and stories of deep human sorrow paving the way for the joy of human endurance to shine through. Al’s voice was clearly the splash of stream and that made it both the river and the rock at the same time. Elements of chaotic change and sure bedrock all rolled together in one distinct sound.

Al’s lost reminded me of the passing of New York’s own maestro of locura and verse, el Reverendo Pedro Pietri. Another maverick who defined his own poetics and never let the river of current public opinion change the measure of his poetry.

I’m glad Barb has a chance to share the message of Al’s work and spirit with the community over at Poetry Foundation and let his words shine in the continuum of American Poetry.

District 9 mnu sign
Originally uploaded by district9pics

If there is any justice in the universe, “District 9″ will gross double the box office bank of “Transformers 2.” This is one of the best movies of this summer, it’s also rich enough in backstory and sequel possibilities to insure a continued fan mythos.

As is my way, I avoided spoilers like the plague coming into this movie and it paid off as writer/director Neill Blomkamp brings the viewer right into his own alternate reality where an alien mothership lands over Johannesburg, South Africa in 1989 creating worldwide interest and, apparently, allowing Apartheid to continue unchecked. Thus establishing that humans in this reimagined history will be indifferent to a singular injustice if the welfare of the planet is at stake. So with the threat of an alien invasion at the world’s doorstep, you can just imagine how the leaders of the world gathered and decided that it would be best to let the ruling political party of South Africa deal with the aliens in any way they saw fit. You can also imagine the the Apartheid regime skyrocketing the rents for J’burg office space to all the mutlinationals wanting to get close to the aliens and Sun City enjoying record tourism. Yeah, in “District 9″ timeline, the idea of strict borders, undocumented immigration and homeland security is at the highest levels of xenophobic paranoia.

Which, like most great sci-fi morality fables, is not very different from our actual reality.

Back to “District 9″ the movie: Blomkamp does a remix of “The Blair Witch Project,” “Alien Nation,” and the classic “The Fly” with some elements of “Battlestar Galactica” to produce a docu-fiction telling us everything we need to know about the aliens (who are not even officially named but nicknamed as “the prawns”) and our history with them. Like a good documentary, it tries to show all the sides of the argument it wants to win. The aliens came but without the heraldry of new technology, world peace or even a good flying car. Worse, they’re ugly. No sexy tights suits, no androgynous sex appeal and no desire to share their deep philosophy. No, they look like big insects who communicate in clicks and gurgles and the first human impulse is to spray em with the biggest can of Raid we can find.

Worse, the alien mothership is parked in earth’s precious sky which (in gov’t mentality) means we have to go, assess their needs and drop em in a ghetto. Multi-National United (MNU) has been put in charge of the aliens relocation needs which amounts to little more than putting the aliens in the most of the way location they can. Blomkamp liberally overlaps South African history here for incredible effect.

All is going well in MNU’s world until Wikus van der Merwe, a mid-level cog in the corporate machine, gets too close to the aliens and inadvertently discovers the next step in both the aliens’ and MNU’s plans. I’ll stop here with the storyline because I hate giving away the film and the strength in Blomkamp’s film isn’t the plot but how he manages to twist our percpetions on what’s right and wrong about survivalism.

The action scenes are amazing with an incredible body count and more gore than you can imagine but without the overwrought soundscape of “Terminator Salvation” and minimal sci-fi exposition. Blomkamp doesn’t inundate us with useless techno-babble or meandering speeches, we know the aliens are here, we know they don’t look like us, and we hate them for it. Period. Now how can we explore that and find out what is really human about us and what, if anything, is really alien about a species that just wants to live their lives.

“District 9″ is packed with all the requisite sci-fi shoot-em-up tropes (the Gundam armor is a joy to behold), the alien-human communication foibles (the interactions between Wikus and the aliens effortlessly transforms from overlord to necessary allies to comradery to friendship), and the look at human behavior from the outside in but does so with compassionate acting performance, amazing CGI and a strong storyline that is destined to be our next great myth.

More “District 9″
• Barb’s write-up
• Roger Ebert’s review
• IO9′s thoughts

What a crazy last few weeks I’ve had. The way things are going right now, I’ve got half-a-mind to head over to the Oaks Card Club with nothing more than six bits in my pocket and see if I can walk out with a new Prius.

A’ight. Maybe not so much.

Still, there is much to be grateful for in my poetry life lately. Great wife, good friends, contact with mentors, growing community and new writing (poems, short stories, plays). Barb will soon be blogging for the Poetry Foundation. And now add to this bounty the invitation to speak on a panel at AWP. Oh yeah, I’m feeling good and lucky.

This after telling Barb how much I’ve been dying to check out AWP. Not for the nonsense, gossip and geekiness (Oh no, that I’ll save for when I hit Comic Con. Yoo hoo!) but to just be a poet who loves print culture and see what goes down behind the scenes. Of course, this does remind me of that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where the Scoobie are acting all dumb and Spike is equal parts horrified and ashamed at the realization of how wack-jobbed the crew that constantly kicks his ass really is. (Oh yes, Comic Con, you are next on my wish list.)

Anyways, I’m still psyched to be at AWP as a panelist participant but also hope to cause a little bit of slam/performance/street/Nuyo/Acentos/spoken word/Latino/Bronx/Oakland poet raucous in the house. If you are also going to AWP and want to say ‘What up!’ I’ll be easy to find, look for the dude with the I ♥ Haters shirt.

Excerpt from The Literary City
Originally uploaded by geminipoet

My second writing class out here in the Bay Area was Kearny Street Workshop’s Putting the There in There: Writing about Place with Thy Tran. Thy pushed the writing group to locate our writing in a specific place and to map it out, not only in our verse but to lay out the terrain we were exploring in drawings like a real cartographer would. For me, this resulted in a basic stick figure map of my home in West Oakland. For my writing, I was able to conjure an “atlas of nationalism” (my flarf poem on cartography and how it reduces the immigration experience to a simple line) and “A Personal History and Reflection on Sixty Years in the City from the Reverend JT” (a transcription poem representing choices a father has to make raising his son in an urban environment). For the writing group, the result was a great anthology, Points Not Found: Writings on the Meaning of Place.

Since then, cartography remains a voice in the back of my head as I map out the various spaces in and around Anywhere Avenue. My last poem depicts the playground in every ‘hood. I just submitted a three page short story about a father/son working out how they’re going to escape the Bronx while overlooking an excavated street from the vantage point of the apartment fire escape. I’m also composing a three-minute play that goes down at the corner social club, another fixture in my memories of the 70s South Bronx. All this to bring Anywhere Avenue out of my imagination and into print.

A fine example of conflating the imaginary map with physical reality is over at SF Gate as highlights Ian Huebert’s mashup of literary quotes and the geography of San Francisco, an excerpt of Heubert’s map is above but click here to enjoy it in its full glory. (Props to AuthorScoop.com for pointing out this article.)

Literary map of San Francisco
John McMurtrie

A nub of 47 square miles, much of it punctuated by vertigo-inducing hills, most of it surrounded by ocean water – half of it the open, not-so-tranquil Pacific, the other half the calm, protected currents of a gray-blue bay.

Just as San Francisco has been shaped by its dramatic earthquake-scarred, coastal setting, the city, despite its relative youth, has also been defined by legions of writers whose words have brought it to life. Jack London, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Alice Adams, Amy Tan, Michelle Tea – they have all etched the landscape for us.

Rest of the article is at SFGate.com.