Oak Cliff, 10.11-12.2024

I hung up some flyers for Hay Festival Forum Dallas in Tarrant County, and for my trouble, Ernesto Monteil and Javier Garcia del Moral rewarded me with a weekend pass with a plus one. My wife and I don't get to go on many dates these days; she's not a huge experimental music fan, but fortunately she's indulgent enough not to mind when my buddy Mike and I want to head up to Denton or over to Dallas to partake of the offerings at Molten Plains or The Wild Detectives (both of which have Ernesto's fingerprints all over them), and more recently at Full City Rooster. But I digress. This was a welcome opportunity for us to absorb some extraordinary cultural experiences.

In preparation for the event, we re-watched the HBO series of Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, and I started to re-read the novel -- which I first read after viewing the series. It seemed to me then that the screenwriters had taken some liberties with Nguyen's text, some of which (particularly casting Robert Downey, Jr., as all of the Caucasian characters) were to my liking, others less so. 

Arriving at TWD for Nguyen's talk, I was struck by the number of Asian people in attendance -- probably the most I'd seen anywhere since the L.A. Cambodian rock band Dengue Fever played at Lola's in Fort Worth and a bunch of Khmer kids from Haltom City came down to check them out. I talked to a couple of women from Austin, who'd driven up because "he had an event in Austin that was $300, which the Vietnamese community can't afford, but he told me he had one in Dallas that was free."

Nguyen responded to smart questions from the TWD book club, then took questions from the audience. He alluded to the writer's life of "misery and suffering," and the fact that "no one cares" (which can be liberating as well as humbling for the aspiring creative). In reference to the changes the TV writers made to The Sympathizer, he pointed out that a visual medium provides the opportunity to depict elements and aspects of the story that wouldn't be possible in print, and also to make the story "more meta," particularly in its depiction of the "film-within-a-film" The Hamlet, making the novel's critique of US propaganda more cartoonish and burlesque-like. 

You could tell Nguyen teaches from the way he was able to craft a coherent response to any question he received. He also spoke about Asian-American identity being a product of racism, and the continuity between US military adventures in East Asia (the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia) and those in Southwest Asia since 2001, as well as the continuity between the American myth of the ever expanding Western frontier and Israeli colonization and genocide in Palestine. His words about "solidarity and kinship" between East and West Asian Americans hit home particularly hard. I'll be digesting this talk for awhile yet.

Afterward, Ernesto told me Nguyen stayed for quite awhile, signing books and interacting with audience members. I queued up to get his autograph on my copy of The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer, then we headed over to Texas Theatre to hear The Historic Orchestra play a live soundtrack to the 1928 Expressionist film The Man Who Laughs. The orchestra comprised Jeremy Buller (Bosque Brown), Jesse Chandler (Pneumatic Tubes, Mercury Rev), Jason Reimer (History at Our Disposal), and Clay Stinnett (Ghostcar, Hoaries). While the silent film originally came with a synchronized musical score, the four musicians provided striking counterpoint, with rock dynamics, to the grotesqueries depicted on-screen. 

Saturday we missed the Sketches of Spain lunch because we had to feed and dose our old man cat (who isn't used to both of us being out of the house for extended periods), but we made it back to Texas Theatre in time to catch the screening of Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's Amores perros, surely one of the best-written films I've ever watched multiple times, and an interview with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, who interweaves plotlines more skilfully than any other writer of whom I'm aware. Viewing the film again, I realized a decisive moment for one of the characters that I'd previously missed (no spoilers here).

Arriaga's interview was conducted in Spanish, with live translation provided using in-ear monitors. While the translator did their best, perhaps dealing with an unfamiliar dialect, and Arriaga occasionally switched to English, it might have been more effective to employ translation software like many opera companies use for superscript titles. 

Arriaga spoke about how there are two kinds of writers -- those who begin writing with a detailed plan in mind and those who follow the story -- and said that he is of the second kind. He revealed that some plot elements in Amores perros were inspired by events in his own life, and spoke of the differences between Mexicans and Americans, which perhaps explains why I find Amores perros the most impactful of the "death trilogy" he wrote for Innaritu (the other two films in the trilogy, 21 Grams and Babel, featured big-name American stars and had less of the earlier film's gritty, documentary-like feel).

The presentation of Valeria Luiselli, Leonardo Heilblum, and Ricardo Giraldo's Echoes from the Borderlands was a bit like seeing a play in workshop. For the past five years, the three have been recording sounds (including stories from people they meet along the way) and taking photographs along the US-Mexico border, starting in California and moving through Arizona and New Mexico. They've just started working in Texas, and author Luiselli says they'll probably continue their documentary work for "five to seven years." 

When complete, Echoes from the Borderlands will be a 24-hour immersive experience (because that's how long it would take to make the journey). What we saw was a one-hour abridgement of the 12 hours of material they currently have assembled. Composer Heilblum and Giraldo have been recording both binaurally (simulating the way humans actually hear) and quadrophonically at every location. The soundscape they've created includes sounds of nature as well as human activity, with the various sounds located in a realistic sound picture. Luiselli's text included discussions of forced sterilization of indigenous women, the influence of American eugenics on Nazi Germany, and the development of the intrauterine device.

We only caught a handful of events, but the festival also included conversations with authors Douglas Stewart and Bruna Dantas Lobato, Mircea Cartarescu, and Mariana Enriquez, a performance/interview with guitarist Phil Manzanera, and discussions of race and justice in America, the global fentanyl crisis, the power of indigenous language and culture, and Texas wildfires. All in all, it amounted to a veritable SXSW of ideas, with many free events as well as ticketed ones with prices ranging from $5 to $15. We'll be paying attention the next time Hay Festival comes to Dallas, and The Wild Detectives continues bringing cultural conversation (and left-of-center music) to the area on the regular.

We finished our the night with takeout from Benito's, which wound up providing us with breakfast as well as late dinner and a reminder why I always used to stop off there on the way home from the airport upon returning from out of town.