Daniel José Older's Blog, page 8
July 22, 2012
Salsa Nocturna Liner Notes: Magdalena
July 18, 2012
Death On The Fine Line
Salsa Nocturna Liner Notes: Protected Entity
July 17, 2012
Guestblog: Borges’ Birdman & The Roots of Story
July 13, 2012
Salsa Nocturna Liner Notes: Graveyard Waltz
Gordo, having lost his job at the overnight care center, ends up working at Evergreen Cemetery, naturally. The still-unwritten story that this one runs peripheral to is Janey’s adventures creating Brooklyn’s version of the Golem with the kids she works with at the nonprofit. I’ve always loved the Golem story, which involves a man-made monster saving the Jewish community of Prague and running wild in the process. It’s the root of Frankenstein and asks us difficult questions as artists and activists: What does it mean to really make change? The Golem gets to the roots, forces the difficult struggle beyond charity or politics and it’s not always pretty.
Amidst all that, Gordo’s stuck with his own whimsical thoughts about the city beyond the cemetery and an nasty cleanup job.
Below is one of the promos for Salsa Nocturna that features this story.
July 12, 2012
Salsa Nocturna Liner Notes: Skin Like Porcelain Death
Marcus Garvey Park has always felt like it was populated by the serenest of ancient park spirits, nodding and hmmming at the antics of all the families and teenagers and drunks that play out around them. I used to sit there on an overnight ambulance – it was one of the busiest units I ever worked, sat right below 125th street in Harlem and they kept us moving with messiness – but the park was always a quiet sanctuary.
Part two of this story, my take on the classic House Of Dolls horror trope, actually comes from a real experience I had in high school dating a girl that lived in some masshole suburb whose mom had a dedicated an entire room of their house to her creepy American Girl doll collection and when you walked in you could feel them all staring at you with those glassy undead eyes. Of course it ended up in a short story…
Salsa Nocturna Liner Notes: Salsa Nocturna
I used to work at an overnight care center for deaf kids with emotional problems. It was the summer before I went to Cuba and I would stay up all night studying music while the little ones slept. Sometimes they’d wake up to use the bathroom or because they’d had nightmares, but my ASL was pretty limited. I’d read their files between music excercises on my toy piano: “Their twisted little sagas unwind through evaluation forms and concerned emails. Julio plays with himself at meal times. Devon isn’t allowed near mirrors on the anniversary of his rape. Tiffany hides knives in case the faceless men come back for her.”
That experience forms the backdrop to this story, a Brooklyn remix of the Orpheus myth complete with a toy piano and creepy basement.
Salsa Nocturna Liner Notes: Tenderfoot
The inspiration for this story came one night when I was outside in the backyard I had at the time. I’d built a little shrine for Oshun on the concrete grill under some trees and I was spending some time with it. A warm wind picked up, the leaves around me shook and shushed and I heard a high-pitched crooning beneath it all.
It wasn’t human, some animal and I couldn’t tell where it was coming from – somewhere in the trees it seemed til I ducked down and saw something moving in the darkness inside the grill. It was a mama-cat and what at first looked like strange bumps in her fur turned out to be a litter of brand new kittens, barely hours old.
The kittens became a creature much larger and more frightening but the moment of being in the middle of all that nature in the middle of the city, of being close to something wild and fierce and still so vulnerable – that stuck with me.
Tenderfoot is part murder mystery, part supernatural thriller part parable about the painful joy of letting go.
June 28, 2012
Salsa Nocturna: The Publisher’s Weekly Review
A delicate mix of horror and humor permeates this striking and original set of 13 linked supernatural noir tales. Carlos Delacruz is “barely alive at all, a botched resurrection, trapped in perpetual ambiguity.” Naturally, he works as a soulcatcher for New York City’s Council of the Dead. Carlos and Gordo, an old Cubano who finds musical inspiration among the muertos, serve as common threads in a tapestry depicting the growing restlessness of the dead under the Council’s bureaucratic rule. Colorfully depicted New York neighborhoods are secretly populated by an army of ghosts—including birds, mysterious giants, and the trapped souls of an African burial ground—as well as the eccentric soulcatchers themselves. Older gracefully draws together the stories of a young man who finds an unnerving set of dolls at his girlfriend’s home, a child abuse survivor out for revenge, and serial killers both spectral and human, securing himself a place among the rising stars of the genre. (July)http://publishersweekly.com/978-0-6156244-57
June 27, 2012
On Balance: Comfort & Surprise
A lot of the pleasure we find in music comes from the interplay between comfort and surprise. Most mainstream songs use any of a handful of basic patterns and chord progressions, be it verse-chorus-verse, 12 bar blues, AAAB, etc. We hear that familiarity and we warm to it. From the midst of one of Coltrane’s most hypnotizing solo emerges the familiar strains of My Favorite Things. Radiohead, for all their ingenuity and chaos, still land back on the one. It’s comforting – we have a sense of where we’re being taken. But then, we are fickle: we don’t want to be bored. Total predictability is a lose too. We crave some surprise. Something to make us go hmm long after the song’s done.
Greatness lies in the harmonizing of those two divergent pleasures.
I find this to be true in literature as well. A great book holds me close, employs all those familiar elements of story that griots and bards have been using since the before the written word. But then there’s a divergence: an element of discomfort or uncertainty that reminds me everything might not be alright after all, that the stakes are a little higher this time, that I need to watch every word to not miss some blistering truth laced within the prose. That’s what makes the shit worth reading, remembering, savoring.
The Hunger Games is a very typical story: the single tribute raging against an unfair regime with the help of gifts from the sky theme can be traced back at least to Theseus and I’m sure much deeper. The hero quest is as old as they come and dystopias pop up everywhere we look in modern YA lit. There’s even a love triangle. So we’re on home territory. But The HG uses a sparse, urgent tone and brutal, unromanticized violence to let us know that it will be a raw, relentless ride; that it won’t shy away from ugly truths about rebellion and survival. And indeed it doesn’t: Katniss navigates a morally ambiguous political landscape full of treachery and false heroes. We don’t know which love interest to root for, we’re not sure if the rebels are who they say they are, it’s not even totally clear what ‘winning’ means by the last book.
The HG trilogy isn’t the first to employ moral ambiguity, but it’s a refreshing change from the throngs of good vs evil YA/fantasy stories out there. Refreshing in that it’s uncomfortable: as the grittiness becomes clear, you form a trust with the book: on some level, you feel, this story will tell it like it is. It won’t shy away from things we know to be true but don’t like to speak about. The best books are never Yes Men; they are wake up calls.
