Culture Archives | Page 26 of 27 | As in guillotine...

Interview: Fialkov on Elk’s Run

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:March 16, 2005
Post category:Media Personal Pop Culture Reviews
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It's a sad fact in the comics industry today that succesfully launching a brand new title is a Herculean feat for the Big Two, requiring a massive marketing and promotion campaign with no guarantees of success. For independent publishers, it's a near impossible task. Even sadder is the fact that the lower half of the Diamond Top 100 - wholly dominated by mainstream super-heroes, historied licenses and/or A-list creators - typically bottoms out around 25,000 copies, making "successful" a somewhat relative term. So what to do when a really good comic book comes along, one not in the front of…

Interview: Dabb on Atomika

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:February 17, 2005
Post category:Personal Pop Culture
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Andrew Dabb is a busy man. Between writing Megacity909 and Mu for Studio Ice/Devil's Due, and Ghostbusters for 88mph Studios, you'd think his plate was full enough. But starting this March, he teams up with artist Sal Abbinanti for Atomika, "a groundbreaking story of men, supermen and the forces that shape our reality," set in an alternate future where Russia won the space race, the arms race, and eventually, the inevitable war with the USA, and where technology is God. I caught up with him online... Comic Book Commentary: Atomika - the 30-second pitch? Andrew Dabb: Atomika is an alternate…

Adios, Nueva York

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:September 23, 2004
Post category:Personal
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CITY LIMITS' September/October 2004 issue has a timely article, Adios, Nueva York, about the Puerto Rican exodus from New York City during the last decade. According to the 2000 census, NYC lost 10% of its Puerto Rican population between 1990-2000! While many left for the island, a significant number have headed to surprising destinations like Lawrence, MA and Reading and Allentown, PA, doubling the overall Latino population in each city -- 60%, 37% and 24% respectively. The article itself focuses on Allentown - the metropolitan neighbor of my theoretical oasis, Bethlehem - and the troubles migrating Nuyoricans, primarily from the…

Nickel and Dimed; Tainos

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:November 14, 2003
Post category:Personal
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This has felt like an unusually long week that I managed to make feel even longer by taking an early lunch. The minutes they are a'ticking slowly... I'm simultaneously reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America and Irving Rouse's The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus. I resisted Nickel and Dimed for a couple of years, annoyed by the "duh!" factor of someone doing a study on how hard it is to be poor. Happily, though, I was wrong, finding Ehrenreich's honesty about her project refreshing ("Almost anyone could do what…

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:October 28, 2003
Post category:Uncategorized
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In the end, Breath, Eyes, Memory turns out to be one of those disappointing books that is much less than the sum of its parts. I suspect much of the praise it received stemmed more from American fascination with youth and "exotic" cultures than from its modest artistic merits. Danticat is talented, without a doubt, but this book is a short story clumsily stretched into novel-length, barely, full of archetypes and allegories but not nearly enough character development. In the end, you don't really know or care about anybody or anything; what should be an intense and emotionally harrowing story…

Nothing representing Latinos

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:September 23, 2003
Post category:Personal
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Tonight is Acentos and the cluttered attic that is my brain has been toying with an idea that Rich Villar mentioned last month, a couple of weeks after their show with Louis Reyes Rivera.

When I heard they had a disappointing turnout for it – including my stupid hungover ass among the missing! – I was extremely surprised. Not even the scenesters made the short hike to the Bronx for what was, by all accounts, an amazing experience. At the following Acentos, Rich and I talked about it and some interesting ideas he was considering.

In a seemingly unrelated moment, while preparing for the Oneonta show last week, I was putting together a list of poetry resources for the audience and was dismayed to realize that I had nothing representing Latinos! Spent a while on Google looking for an equivalent to the Asian American Writer’s Workshop or Cave Canem and came up empty.

Nada!

All of this got me thinking about the significant gap that exists between the generation of poets that founded the Nuyorican Poets Café back in the ’70s and my own generation of relatively unpolished but well-intentioned newcomers, echoing the concerns Rich had raised a few weeks earlier.

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Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:September 9, 2003
Post category:Personal
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It's rant time. The whole home ownership aspect of the "American Dream" escapes me. A couple of years ago, four or five months after Isaac was born, the combination of frustration over being unable to find a decent apartment to rent and the lure of owning our own place, led us to look into buying a condo. Salomé had not returned to work yet so we applied for a mortgage based only on my income and were surprised by how much they felt we could afford. In the end, the whole process nearly drove me crazy, literally, as the road…