Interesting how late seventies and eighties urban history is handled in the movie "Pinero." The movies producers and director/writer confirm a prediction made by Nuyorican Poet's Cafe co-founder Miguel Algarin more than 25 years ago about efforts to bring Latino creativity into the mainstream, "I see a lot of waste because before the great Hispanic hit is going to come out you're going to have to break through all of the cliches." Miguel Algarin August 1977. The movie about Miguel Pinero's life reinforces the view no matter how creative Puerto Ricans in the U.S. are we're still a bunch of savages

Mario Vargas Llosa, el escritor hispano-peruano de reconocida trayectoria dio una lectura de su más reciente novela Travesuras de la niña mala el día 15 de octubre en el Kaufmann Concert Hall de la YMCA sobre la calle 92 en Manhattan, más conocido como la “Y” en Nueva York.

La más reciente novela de Mario Vargas Llosa, el laureado escritor hispano-peruano, es un “page-turner”, o sea uno de esos libros que se empiezan y no se pueden soltar. Gran parte de ese logro es gracias una historia de amor insólita que nos hace recorrer seductoras ciudades del mundo como: Paris, Londres, Madrid y Tokio durante cuatro décadas, ilustradas con modas, colores, música y sabores. Añádale el trasfondo social de los años 50, 60, 70 y 80 vistos desde Europa hacia el Perú y la sensación, la remembranza, que es como está narrado el libro lo hará identificarse con la historia colectiva de las épocas.

GONE is thick with visual layers. It is a wry look at family and friends, where 'digi-scape' meets urban monument to reflect a hidden landscape of the underground artist. The story is loosely based on a television series from the early 70's -- a real life TV docu-drama called An American Family staring the "Louds" -- and un-folds during a family reunion in New York City. In GONE Dougherty employs archetypal and cartoony characters that drawn from her personal life experiences to tell a story that speaks to the New York fringe. She draws on a world of homegrown talent whose life stories blur with the real and imagined. Painter Amy Sillman plays a visiting mother and musician Frances Sorensen, plays Lance's ambiguous live-in "other."

Cool For You begins like a nostalgic joy ride tracing the roots of protagonist Eileen Myles, in and out of Boston and ends years later with a POV down Avenue D. This nonfiction novel lingers and pauses on some moments, only to shift and turn the next. The tone is cool detachment and endearing softness and it grabs the reader, who rides shotgun on the journey, from the first page:

"...we sat around the fire/ drinking my baby's blood/ Drinking my baby's blood?/ Shock value?/ Nothing shocks us anymore - me, you./ We can talk about this now can't we?"

As average Americans, on most ordinary days, we wake each morning in a far away place. There might be a transvestite singing gospel right outside our window, there might be an unfortunate day ahead of us—we might lose our jobs or miss old lovers, we might be alcoholics or cripples, we might be sad or broke, hungry, heart-broken, lost, but these kinds of troubles all seem internal luxuries when held up to the government sanctioned horrors that inhabit many faraway worlds. Rarely do we imagine that a bad day might entail a band of revolutionary guards walking into our offices as we are sitting over our coffee, and taking us away to be tortured or killed.

Hot off the University of Wisconsin Presses is J.A. Marzan's The Bonjour Gene -- a story that revolves around the French-descended, Puerto Rican family called Bonjour. Each family member carries with him or her the legacy of the chronic promiscuity of every Bonjour male. Communities in both Puerto Rico and New York City (boroughs included) are also forced to accept the growing populations of illegitimate Bonjour children. Mothers fear their Bonjour child will unknowingly fall in love with another Bonjour. The anxiety of this rampant wantonness is reiterated throughout the book from beginning to end, so that there is no doubt in the reader's mind that the gene is that of licentiousness and irresponsible lust.

The pages of Lolita Hernandez's Autopsy of an Engine and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant ring with rhythmic industrial language intermeshed with the sorrows and bewilderment of Ms Hernandez as she bears witness to the events at the company. She tunes us in to the aging, the declining, and the death of Detroit's Cadillac Motor Car Company: "one orgasmic slam after another of fixtures and furniture into gondolas and c-five pans." We watch the destruction not only of Midwestern industry, but also of all the lives the plant is survived by as people prey like vultures on the remains of the closed facility, recovering metal scraps to sell.

There are two kinds of festivals within the six nights (and one day) of the Vision Festival. There's the festival for people who travel to get there and the festival of people who travel to play. Vision is the highest concentration of New York energy jazz in the world, a fact that year after year seems to eclipse its "world class" (if there's reason to use such a phrase) nature. It is at once a chance to hear within a tight schedule (this year sticking closer to advertised times than ever) the cream of NYC's hard improv: Sabir Matteen, Roy Campbell Jr., William Parker, Borah Bergman, Daniel Carter, Rob Brown, Steve Swell, Billy Bang, Henry Grimes and (for the last time as such) the David S. Ware Quartet. But their presence, and that of such perennial associates as Kidd Jordan, Hamid Drake, Bill Dixon and Joe Morris, shouldn't overshadow the sweet surprises each year brings.

The oldest and simplest of families of instruments is also the largest and most diverse. From Charlie Parker to The Sex Pistols, percussion has been the common element to and the driving force behind most forms of music in the last hundred years. The instruments can be metal or wood, outfitted with leather or strings; they can be carried, sat behind or worn. They can be simple and homemade or complex and expensive. Watch tourists gather around a guy beating on plastic buckets on a New York subway platform and you'll get the idea: Drums are everywhere, and are made from just about anything.

It makes a certain amount of sense that the first survey to be written about Gypsy musicians across Europe would come from an outsider (although given that there's no real "inside" to the Roma diaspora, it's almost an inevitability). Garth Cartwright, a New Zealander living in London, describes himself as a "refugee from Auckland's disembodied suburbs" -- not exactly a political exile, but still a scribe with a feeling of separation from the motherland and a clear empathy for the generations of Gypsy homelessness. He's shamelessly a stranger in a strange land, devoted to his subject.

On June 13, when the doors of the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts open for Vision Festival XI, Arts for Art -- the organization that organizes and presents the annual jazz fest -- will also be opening the door to the adoration and criticism they've faced every year for a decade. The praise and complaints are largely for the same thing, namely for hosting hours and hours of high energy jazz. Horns blaring, basses booming and drums being beaten, it's a tradition carried on for some forty years, in the wake of the great John Coltrane.

"It has a lot to do with the ups and downs of living here, not knowing how I'm going to pay my rent, but knowing somehow…" she said. She remembers the lessons learned from "watching my parents hustle -- the refrigerator would be empty and my mother would always come up with something."

elling the story of the label that more than any other brought the new, high-energy jazz of the 1960s to the listening public was a logical next step for author Ashley Kahn. His 2002 book A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album is a remarkable and highly readable piece of jazz history. To follow it up, Kahn dove deep into the label that made the album, and arguably the careers of Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp and Pharaoh Sanders possible.

The biodome has evolved here in America, expanding itself, encasing all in our society. This time, instead of using plastic to protect the interior environment from inclement weather, the media blithely plasters up billboards for the next unoriginal Hollywood remake, blinding the masses with bling to protect the status quo. Within this bubble, American dream obsessions with wealth makes it difficult for the individual to comprehend that stupendous amounts of wealth can only be accumulated and maintained by carefully subjugating another individual to extreme poverty and anguish.