Tudo bom!

Kehinde Wiley has dropped in LA.... again. His third show at Roberts & Tilton, The World Stage: Brazil, opened April 4th and runs through the end of May. It incorporates approximately 10 of Wiley's notoriously oversized oils on canvas, all of which depict male Brazilian models emulating poses of historic and nationalistic Brazilian artworks. The bright backgrounds are modeled after found Brazilian fabrics, and each canvas is finished with an ornate black frame. The World Stage series, begun in 2007 with The World Stage: China, has enabled Mr. Wiley to place young contemporary black males into the contexts of nationalistic and identifying artworks of China, Africa, India, and now Brazil. Each portrait provokes the viewer to reinvision the traditionally white European male iconic images that are so familiar. The authority and importance associated with the traditional subjects is therefore transferred to the contemporary models selected by Wiley. All of the men depicted in these new works were hand chosen by Wiley and his team from the favela streets in Brazil, and were asked to come to the studio, usually the day of their meeting, in clothing of their choosing to pose and be photographed for the paintings.

The exhibition travels to the Modern Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro from June 27th to August 22nd, 2009.

"...the 1970 Chevrolet Nova is a lot better automobile than O.J. Simpson."

Apologies for going AWOL. Excuses abound: "Work deadline" is one. "Not writing anything" is another. "Early-onset delirium tremens" is better still. Let's just say I'm missing a shoe.

To recap: I still have a job, the Giants are satisfactorily inconsistent, and the Niners picked up a guy who could prove to be the second coming of John Taylor but is just as likely to channel fellow 10-pick J.J. Stokes. Also, John Starks has nothing better to do this Sunday than to ref some dbag kickball league in Brooklyn.

And since we've come this far, let's just charge the post to sports and toss in a vintage ad that would be funnier if both Potrero's Finest and Detroit's Worst weren't so utterly fucked at present:

GoodNews/BadNews: Mice and Machetes

Trinitarios de Los Sures

The Good: Specklebutt seems to have taken care of the mouse situation at DCQhq. 

The Bad: The gangs have apparently emerged from their slumber for the warm-weather machete-attack season. 

The Badder: Some of them are spicing things up by slathering poison on their sharpened machete tips. You know, for max sliceage points. And the ones that weren't before will be once they meander past La Dolce Musto in this past week's Village Voice. 

The Who Knew!?: The hood used to be much, much worse. 

The OK: The attacks seem to revolve around the southern edge of the Bedford Ave. gentrification corridor, where randomly chosen victims are more likely to be trust-fund hipster kids than, say, I dunno, me. That said, Sazon Perez pernil expeditions may henceforth be restricted to daylight hours. 

The Doubly Related: A member of the DCQ family once obtained a rusty machete while vacationing as a child in the Yucatán. Said homeboy tried to carry it on to the plane. Inspection failed. A classic customs blunder. 

Oy vey!

Poor Woody. He's just working away on his film-per-year ouevre (only Spike Lee is as prolific) and minding his own business... when Dov Charney goes and plasters his image from Annie Hall, promoting American Apparel, all over NY and LA, without his consent. Since the billboards' brief showing 2 years ago, Woody has filed a $10 million suit against Americal Apparel for using the image without his permission. And since then, the gloves have really come off. American Apparel's attorneys are arguing that Woody's image certainly cannot be worth $10M, as "[they] believe that Mr. Allen's popularity has decreased significantly, especially in light of the scandals he's been associated with. [They] believe that he greatly overvalues the worth of his endorsement -- if he can get one." Diiiiisssssss.













Of course the scandal that they're referring to is Woody's breakup with Mia Farrow and relationship with former step-daughter, and later wife Soon-Yi Previn. Woody returns the blow by claiming that American Apparel is engaged in a "despicable effort to intimidate" him. The trial starts May 18th in NY.
And did you know that Woody has a statue erected in his honor in Oviedo, Spain? Neither did I.

Epidemic Polemic

So apparently, Nadja Benaissa, a 26-year-old singer in Germany's famed girl group No Angels (equivalent to the US's Danity Kane) has been arrested on suspicion of infecting one or more sexual partners with HIV. It is unclear whether or not she was in fact the transmitter, according to the source, so I don't understand how this is even publishable news at this point.

Many additional questions continue to float about in my head. I understand that it is incredibly immoral to have unprotected sex without disclosing the fact that you have HIV to your partner. But couldn't she have been unaware that she was carrying the virus? In that case, is she still culpable? And how did she become infected? If from a previous partner, is he also being prosecuted?

I gleaned the following info regarding US laws from a Yahoo answers result (cannot certify its accuracy):

"California has the "Willful Exposure Law" in which it's considered a felony and you can get up to 8 years in prison. Qualifications for guilt are:

1. Having sex

2. Know that you are HIV positive

3. Not telling your partner you are HIV positive

4. Not using a condom

5. Having the specific intent to infect the other person

Usually they get off because how do you prove "specific intent"? However, The AIDS Policy Center in Washington, D.C., reports that 27 other states have established criminal penalties for knowingly transmitting or exposing another person to HIV. If you want to press charges you need to contact a lawyer and find out what the law specifies in your state."

Two Months and Counting...

Two months till the Puertoriqueños retake Manhattan. We stopped by Sazon Perez tonight to honor the date. (I can't believe they have a website! Dinner costs like four bucks.) The thick girl behind the counter explained that their two fish dishes were "catfish and regular fish." Went with the catfish and habichuelas, with a side of pernil. The guy next to me in line started talking to me in broken English, telling me to order the pernil, which I obviously was going to do anyway. This happens literally two out of three times I go there. It's risky business to migrate to Spanish mid-conversation, though, so usually my little talks with the locals end with one of us saying something the other one doesn't understand, and then the other guy nods in feigned agreement. Then we both slide away slowly to opposite sides of the room, staring at the ground.

Anyway, more shots from last year...

Home Invasion

DCQ headquarters has come under siege. It started back in the fall, when the landlord responded to our complaint of "there's mice" by giving us two 99-cent glue traps that never caught anything. At that point it seemed we were dealing with a lone invader, but then he multiplied into two, then four, then eight, maybe more? We bought snap-traps that didn't work. They made off like bandits with pounds of cheese. Every night, these cretins run amok, gobbling crumbs and shitting on everything. Come in the kitchen after dark and you're sure to see one of the little bastards bolt across the counter, plunge into the burner and escape through the stove. So we got a bunch of poison disguised as delicious mouse food. They ate two boxes of it and came back for thirds. Things looked dire.

Then we befriended Specklebutt.

He set up shop like Chris and Snoop:

Now nobody fucks with us.

Pair with Jameson, Jack, Patron or Schlitz

If there's better drinking music out there, do inform.

Of Pirates, Passover and Pablo Sandoval

A Passover for the memories: It snowed in April, the sun returned to its God-chosen point of origin, and the deli guy topped my morning bagel with cream cheese and lox instead of its raggedy Appalachian cousin lox spread. And finally, thanks to a very large and loud collection of family friends/benefactors, my fridge is now stocked with several containers of mysterious concoctions involving raisins, nuts, matzoh and "ch" sounds. 

In other news, a crew of American seamen provided more fodder for ethnocentric Yanks by overthrowing their Somalian pirate captors, while another group of buccaneers clearly slept through the "What Kind of Boats to Not Hijack" seminar. Most importantly, though, "Pablo Sandoval," IDM's beer-addled trivia team, scored 94 points last night in its first contest of the year, which happened to coincide with a successful first contest of the year for a certain baseball team by a certain bay. Pablo Sandoval's showing was good enough for second place, as the number '94' oft is in things such as trivia and, say, baseball. We didn't receive a wild card playoff invitation because the league's administrative office is populated with Mongoloids, but if we had, we're confident that our fundamental excellence (in geography, pop culture, sports and music, as it were) would have allowed us to dominate the opposition, who only won because we started slow and they were using iPhones like A-Rod used needles. Nevertheless, the 94 remains. An omen? Last I checked, one can still dream.

And finally, enjoy this fun video from a couple of Jamiroquai-sounding Euros (playing Mezzanine on 5/15):

So baseball season's here, which should be fun if I don't get fired.

UNC just won a fairly lackluster national championship game. Tyler Hansbrough still looks like a lemur and Roy Williams like a sun-crisped Huckleberry Hound. And I still can't name a single player on Michigan State other than that one guy Summers who jammed so hard on that UConn guy in the Final Four two days ago. The rout was easily foreseen: No athlete from the state of Michigan will ever succeed in the same place the Lions play.

One of those keen foreseers was none other than Me, and for that, I will show up at work tomorrow and collect like $12 for finishing third in the office pool. Which is about as exciting as getting a free upgrade to the supersized oatmeal when the waitress screws up your order. At the very least, though, the CEO now knows who I am, or at least knows my last name. In theory, this should prove helpful when the inevitable next round of layoffs descends upon the company like Elijah on the Egyptian goyim's firstborn.

On a happier note, baseball season is officially upon us. We took four trains to see the Mets play the Red Sox at New Shea on Saturday only to be stymied by the most anal-retentive ticket policy known to man: The game was sold out, which is fine, but we quickly realized there was nary a single scalper to be had. In the Bronx, plainclothes cops try to bust scalpers, but the street there is usually such a mob scene that it's more of an inconvenience than an impediment. In Queens, on the other hand, it's desolate -- LaGuardia, auto repair shops, and parking lots that stretch all the way to Arthur Ashe offer little shelter to would-be secondhand ticketeers. Scads of cops provide further discouragement. What's more, there's no re-entry at New Shea (Old Shea lies in mounds of concrete rubble in the middle of the New Parking Lot, as it were), so you can't bum used tickets off people leaving and talk your way in.

In other words, the old methods of getting into sold-out sporting events ain't happening at New Shea, which sucks a fat one, because now we have to either plan stuff out like whole days in advance or risk getting fakies off of Craigslist. Also, the cheapest seat is officially bullshit expensive -- i.e., $23 plus fees. I hope the Mets start the season 0-47.

Yeah, the goat. He did it.

A little Röyksopp-infused entertainment for you brainless bastards on a rainy, lazy work-filled Friday afternoon:



We're off for the weekend to Sager Farms, where they grow emus and house criminal-minded goats. Line of the Day: "We cannot confirm the story, but the goat is in our custody."