welcome to beautiful los angeles

we went to los angeles, to scope it out, see the sights, maybe find a place to live. instead, someone broke into my rental car. stole my computer, amalia's books and CDs (including a zora neale hurston voodoo book she just bought). i had a backup CD with all my files on it. in case my computer crashed, you know. better safe than sorry. well, i kept that backup in the same computer bag. for being smart, i'm not so smart sometimes.

the computer was a compaq presario 2104US. it was likely stolen by these guys Amalia and Lamar saw, outside a pawn shop, 3100 block of santa monica blvd. so if you're checking out LA pawn shops and see a presario, send me an email. god knows the LAPD doesn't care. they wouldn't even send a car out, i had to drive to the police station to get a copy of the report for my insurance. and LA detectives don't work weekends (budget cuts), so i would've had to wait a few extra days to even get them to investigate (not that they would seriously do so).

my computer was valuable, at least to me ($2000!). for LA, though, i might be white, but i'm very poor and easy to ignore.

other than that, the trip was fine. saw a vincent valdez show, and we were supposed to see a willie perdomo reading. but the taco shop poets filled in at the last minute. ni modo. our amiga Ana was an excellent host. so many things to do, it'll all have to wait. i gotta re-type my master's thesis from a paper copy. how exciting.

Comments

translation of the Manu Chao song "Me Llaman Calle"

this is about my translation of the Manu Chao song "Me Llaman Calle." [ video below ] i'm reasonably close to a literal translation, with changes to fit the rhythm and number of syllables per line. "baldosa" is like ladrilla (a brick to build a house) except flat like a tile. based on context, i translate it as "cobblestones." Chao also uses "maquinita," literally "little machine," but this implies a small device in english (a machine that does something, but does not move itself - such as a laminating machine, a blood-glucose meter, or an ATM) - so i use "little engine" instead, to imply movement. the one line i'm not happy with is the translation of "no me rebajo"; if i wasn't worried about rhythm, i would translate it as "it doesn't dig ruts into me." the tricky part is that this word, rut, is almost never used as a present-tense transitive verb in english. we generally use it as a noun (...

Refugees in Europe deserve help, but refugees in U.S. deserve to "be sent back"?

--> September 4, 2015 Hillary Clinton on the refugee crisis in Southern Europe: “Well the pictures, well the stories, we’ve been watching this terrible assault on the Syrian people now for years, are just heartbreaking. I think the entire world has to come together, it should not be just one or two countries, or not just Europe and the United States. We should do our part, as should the Europeans, but this is a broader, global crisis. We now have um, more refugees than we’ve had, in many years, I think since the second world war. And as we’ve seen tragically, people are literally dying to escape the conflict in Syria. Uh, I think that the, the larger Middle East, I think Asia, I think everybody should step up and say we have to help these people. And I would hope that, under the aegis of the United Nations led by the Security Council, and certainly by the United States which has been such a generous nation in the past, we would begin to try to...

Should we use a capital framework to understand culture? Applying cultural capital to communities of color

The Acceleration of Metaphorical Capital, from my published article. Copyright Kip Austin Hinton. "Social science research on communities of color has long been shaped by theories of social and cultural capital. This article is a hermeneutic reading of metaphorical capital frameworks, including community cultural wealth and funds of knowledge. Financial capital, the basis of these frameworks, is premised on unequal exchange. Money only becomes capital when it is not spent, but is instead invested, manipulated, and exploited. Metaphorical capitals have been criticized as imprecise, falsely quantitative, and inequitable. Some research assumes that, rather than reinforcing economic class, metaphorical capital somehow nullifies class or replaces economic capital. Yet marginalized students, by definition, have been excluded by dominant culture. Compared to low socioeconomic status (SES) students of color, high SES students have a wealth of capital, in all forms. Metaphorical ca...

Kip Austin Hinton

Search This Blog